How to Display Social Media Followers Count as Text in WordPress

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Have you come across a site that shows their social media followers count along with the icons? Recently, one of our users asked us if there was an easy way to show their social media follower count as text in WordPress without writing any code. In this article, we will show you how to display social media followers count as text in WordPress.

Social Follower Count Buttons

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Social Count Plus plugin. Upon activation, you need to go to Settings » Social Count Plus to enter your social media profiles.

Entering your social media profiles

First you need to enter your Twitter username without the @ sign. e.g. wpbeginner.

To obtain Twitter consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret keys, you need to visit Twitter Developer website and create a Twitter App. Don’t worry it sounds harder than it really is, and we will walk you through the process.

First you need to sign in with your Twitter username and password. Once you are logged in, you need to click on your Profile photo at the top right corner of the screen and from the dropdown click on My Applications.

Click on Twitter My Apps

Twitter will either show you some apps that you previously created, or it will tell you that you currently don’t have any applications. In either case, you need to click on Create New App button.

Creating Twitter App

On the next screen, provide a name for your app, add some description, and enter your website’s URL. After that check the ‘I agree’ box below the terms and conditions. Lastly, click on the Create Your Twitter Application button.

Twitter will now create your application, and you will land on your application settings page. There you need to click on the API Settings tab. On the API Settings, scroll down to your access token section and click on the Generate my access token button. Twitter will reload the page and show you a notification that an access token has been generated for you. After that you need to click on the Test oAuth button.

Generating Twitter Access Keys

On the next screen, you will all the keys you need to copy and paste Social Count Plus settings on your WordPress site.

After entering your Twitter keys, you can add your Facebook page ID. To obtain your Facebook page ID, you need to click on Edit Page while viewing your page as an admin.

Rest of the options are easy. You can add your YouTube Profile, YouTube Channel URL, Google Plus page, Instagram, SoundCloud, etc. You can also choose to display your total post and comment count. Once you are done, click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

Choosing Design For Social Media Follower Count Buttons

Social Count Plus comes with 6 different button design settings to choose from. You can also choose the text color for the follower count text by going to the Design tab in Social Counts Plus settings.

Choose a button design and style for your social media follower count buttons

After choosing a design for your Social Count buttons, you need to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.

Displaying Social Count on Your Site

You can display your social count buttons using widget, shortcodes, and template tags. If you want to add the Social Count buttons to your blogs sidebar, then you need to go to Appearance » Widgets and drag and drop Social Count Plus widget to your sidebar.

Social Count Plus Widget

The plugin comes with a number of shortcodes and functions which you can use in your posts, pages, or your theme’s template files to display Social Count buttons. A list of these shortcodes and functions are available on the plugin’s settings page under the Shortcodes and Functions tab.

Shortcodes and Functions to Display Social Count Buttons

We hope this article helped you display your social media followers count as text on your WordPress blog.

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