3 Best Social Stream Plugins Compared (2017)

Social networks have already gone beyond entertainment content. Today, social networks serve not only to communicate, watch pictures and videos, but also to look for work, offer interesting products, create new brands, compare impressions on purchased goods and services. Any serious business has its representation in social networks, because without it communication with existing and potential customers will be lost.

The responsible and universal role of social networks in modern society places them at the center of attention for all information publications, including online. Social networks are becoming the best source for gathering news and acquaintance with them for the broad masses of the population.

Given such popularity and usefulness of social networks, every owner of the WordPress site should ask himself the question: how do I use social networks for the benefit of my own project? The answer is simple: use social stream plugins to collect, optimize and beautifully present the entire variety of content from social networks.

However, there are already many options for social stream plugins and making the best choice for the needs of the audience of your site is not easy. For this reason, we gathered in today’s article the 3 most popular social stream plugins on the Envato Market for comparison. Let us find out their features and then compare the results in a spreadsheet format so that you can more easily make your choice in favor of one or another plugin.

Flow-Flow — WordPress Social Stream Plugin

Flow-Flow is a modern leader among WordPress social stream plugins by the number of sales and positive customer feedback. In addition, this plugin has the newest updates, which speaks in favor of the relevance of all the features and capabilities of the plugin.

Flow-Flow is designed taking into account the need for a modern social stream plugin in displaying various content from a variety of sources. To one social feed, you can connect any number of accounts from any social networks. In total, Flow-Flow supports 16 different sources of traffic from social networks and more than 40 feed types.

Most social networks provide the opportunity to broadcast their content through different channels. For example, content from Facebook can be provided by personal open profiles or open community profiles. And Twitter allows you to broadcast content on a specific hashtag. All the possibilities of social networks you can appreciate when you begin to work directly with Flow-Flow WordPress Social Stream Plugin.

A distinctive feature of Flow-Flow is the ability to customize the design of each element of your social wall, as well as using different layouts to form a general view of your social feed. Masonry, fixed height and justified layouts will allow you to select the optimal display of content, depending on the type of content that prevails in your social wall. In addition, you can choose the colors and fonts for each element of the social feed.

Each element of your social feed by Flow-Flow includes many useful features. Here your users will find social counters, complete social toolbar, links to the corresponding profiles and sharing buttons. And all this right in your social wall, without the transition to social networks and without losing the traffic of your WordPress site.

An important nuance is also the protection of your data when using Flow-Flow. The plugin does not transfer your API or other personal data to the browser. In addition, the plugin includes a built-in tool for tracking problems in displaying content from social networks. All the content displayed with Flow-Flow is fully mobile responsive.

Another important feature of Flow-Flow is the possibility of pre-moderation of all posts or posts from a particular social network (or on a specific feed). Moderation will allow you to avoid unpleasant situations with inappropriate content and will be an additional protection against any surprises.

Flow-Flow has a convenient admin panel, which is suitable even for beginners WordPress administrators. All settings are intuitive, so creating and customizing your first social wall will be extremely easy!

WordPress Social Board

WordPress Social Board has fewer sales and more rare updates compared to Flow-Flow. However, the WordPress Social Board also serves as a versatile tool for creating responsive, interesting and good-looking social walls. This plugin also has the ability to combine different kinds of content from different social networks in one social feed.

WordPress Social Board supports 17 sources of traffic from social networks and 35 different feeds types. All content from social networks is available only for open accounts and communities. Social feeds by WordPress Social board are mobile responsive and cross browser compatible.

The design settings for your social walls include 6 types of content display, including a carousel slider and rotating feed. You can add the ready social feed on your WordPress site or blog by inserting the code into a page or post, as a widget or as a separate WordPress theme file.

The speed of displaying content in your feeds by WordPress Social Board is optimized using the lazy load feature. This technology allows you to upload images on the page as the user deploys content. Thus, the content is loaded smoothly and the time of the initial page load is significantly reduced.

WordPress Social Board also allows you to customize the various elements of your social feeds using the CSS style editor. This feature will be useful for experienced users who want to get full control over the change of different design elements.

WordPress Social Stream

WordPress Social Stream is the oldest (by the date of creation of the plugin) member of our list. Due to this, the plugin has the largest number of sales, but can not boast the highest rating of user ratings or recent updates. It is very likely that most of the sales of this plugin occurred at the beginning of his career. However, even today it can compete with top social stream plugins for leadership in his field.

WordPress Social Stream offers its users a connection to the content of 15 social networks plus RSS. This plugin is also primarily designed to use several social networks within the same social wall. The number of social networks connected and their various feeds are unlimited for WordPress Social Stream users.

Unfortunately, WordPress Social Stream does not boast a wide range of styles for creating unique social walls. Only 3 layouts are available to users, which differ from each other not by the arrangement of elements (like masonry, fixed height and justified layouts in Flow-Flow), but by colors for some design elements. In addition, WordPress Social Stream offers extensive opportunities to change CSS styles with the built-in editor.

WordPress Social Stream can offer a certain level of interactivity for elements of your social wall. For example, posts from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn can be shared, and Twitter posts can also be retwitted and replied.

The Comparison

Relevant data on 07.07.2017:

Social Networks and Feeds

Important Features

Final Words

Today you got acquainted with the main features of the best social stream plugins on the Envato Market. The choice of the optimal solution among the proposed plugins should first of all be dictated by the needs of your audience.

On the one hand, you can save a few dollars on the purchase of the social stream plugin, but if you are going to develop your WordPress project and invest time and effort, it is better to choose the most modern, often updated and advanced plugin.

We wish you good luck in the development of your WordPress site together with the unique content of social networks!