Connect to Your Fans and Followers with the New Social Icons Widget

Get to know the Social Icons Widget, which lets you connect with fans and followers on over 40 social networks.

July 6, 2017

Kathryn P.

We’re excited to introduce the new Social Icons Widget, which allows you to connect with visitors on your favorite social media networks.

The new widget supports over 40 popular social platforms, from the ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter, to crafter haven Etsy, to artsy enclaves like DeviantArt and Dribbble. Highlight music or podcasts through SoundCloud or iTunes, or connect with your community via Meetup or Yelp. Business owners will also appreciate being able to hook up their company’s LinkedIn page.

The new widget offers more flexibility, letting you choose from among three icon sizes: small, medium, and large. Pick the one that looks best on your site! You can even drag-and-drop the links in your Customizer to reorder your social icons.

Drag and drop social icons

Activate it now by going to My Site → Customize → Widgets. For self-hosted WordPress users, this new widget will be available in Jetpack soon.

If you’ve been using the old Social Media Icons Widget, never fear — your widget will not disappear. You can keep using it if you prefer, but we’d encourage you to switch to the new widget for greater flexibility and more options.

Check out our full guide to using the new widget, or take a look at the video below.

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41 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. konettv Jul 6th at 3:39 pm

    Hi,
    Am using MH template, I followed your instructions, i.e attempted to upload the new social media icon, there is no option for size, and it asked for social media username and not link.

    Liked by 5 people

  2. esther636com Jul 6th at 3:53 pm

    HI,
    I did as you said and it was easy
    thanks

    Liked by 4 people

  3. baddadcartoons101 Jul 6th at 4:02 pm

    The circle of written language: it started with descriptive simple images carved on cave walls to hieroglyphics…Latin…Greek…Roman…English…Spanish… And now back to using small descriptive simple images to convey our thoughts.

    Liked by 8 people

  4. victorhck Jul 6th at 4:09 pm

    I can’t find the free social networks I use, like GNUsocial, Mastodon or Diaspora. Nor Xmpp/jabber icon.
    Well, than that’s not for me…

    Liked by 7 people

  5. Leo Jul 6th at 5:03 pm

    Is there any chances like Whatsapp, telegram (channels), or Line@ account get added in the future? So far it’s only available in share, but those services mentioned are quite popular in Asia

    Liked by 5 people

  6. Jonathan Lovelace Jul 6th at 6:40 pm

    I’ve had a “find me on these social networks” Links section at the top of my sidebar for years, and this would an excellent replacement for that if it supported one more site, namely LibraryThing.

    Liked by 4 people

  7. John O'Regan Jul 6th at 7:07 pm

    Sounds great! 🙂

    I use a screen reader. Is the new widget accessible? How can I select the icons I want and the order in which I want them?

    Liked by 4 people

    • Kathryn P. Jul 7th at 5:08 pm

      Hi John! The new widget should be accessible with a screen reader. To reorder the icons, you can shuffle the URLs by copy-pasting them into different fields — the right icon will be automatically displayed based on the URL entered. Drag-and-drop is not accessible with a screen reader, but we will be adding an alternative reordering mechanism following the way WordPress Core handles it. I’ll keep you posted once that’s available. On the front end, each icon has accompanying text that’s automatically generated to match each icon.

      Liked by 2 people

  8. hx Jul 6th at 7:51 pm

    It would be great if they had icons to share in social networks like: gnu social, diaspora*, mastodon, etc … a big greeting! 🙂

    Liked by 6 people

  9. PlayLegit Jul 6th at 8:13 pm

    This is great news. I’m trying to get people to check us out on SoundCloud as well, hopefully this will help.

    Liked by 5 people

  10. Raquel Ferreira Jul 6th at 10:49 pm

    I did something like that in my blog before using html in text widget, but now it is sooooo much easier!!

    Liked by 5 people

  11. Home's Cool! Jul 7th at 3:55 am

    I’ve had this for a long time, never knew it gave a size option. In fact, just checked mine and it now tells me it’s deprecated. Fine. Guess I’ll dig a bit deeper and figure it out.

    Liked by 4 people

  12. Rocco B Jul 7th at 4:28 am

    Looking forward to seeing which other sites that will be included. Very flexible and straightforward. Nice!.

    Liked by 4 people

  13. layvi444 Jul 7th at 4:36 am

    This is awesome, the old one was a bit outdated. Great for people who don’t only have Facebook.

    Liked by 4 people

  14. shahadhah Jul 7th at 9:26 am

    hi , plz help me in using this I can’t understand the instruction

    Liked by 4 people

  15. Tatenda Jul 7th at 8:19 pm

    this is great, love it !

    Liked by 5 people

  16. Just Imagine Jul 8th at 2:52 am

    Thanks for this! I am new to blogging, this would help me alot. 🙂

    Liked by 4 people

  17. Sunnie Evergale Jul 8th at 10:15 am

    Please add lookbook icon too 😁

    Liked by 3 people

  18. RosemaryMarie Jul 8th at 4:54 pm

    I’m now also using the new widget and I love it! The only thing that would make it absolutely perfect would be if the links opened in new tabs instead of on the same page. I don’t like directing people away from my site. 🙂 Thank you for your hard work.

    Liked by 5 people

  19. ajay kumar Jul 8th at 6:46 pm

    Very useful. Thank you so much kathryn.

    Liked by 3 people

  20. Viju's kitchen Jul 9th at 4:50 pm

    Thank you for the information….. I haven’t started social media yet, because I do not have any videos or snaps for my recipe.

    Liked by 3 people

  21. deepanilamani Jul 10th at 10:17 am

    Thank you so much for letting us know. I have had some of these widgets from sometime back. So is this a new method ?

    Liked by 3 people

    • Kathryn P. Jul 10th at 7:34 pm

      That’s right – this widget replaces the older Social Media Icons widget. You can still keep using the older one if you’re happy with it. This one supports more icons, offers different sizes, and offers drag-and-drop ordering, among other improvements.

      Liked by 2 people

  22. Alex Yong Jul 10th at 7:10 pm

    Hi WordPress: FYI: After inputting via the widget, the Twitter URL doesn’t ultimately render on my site as a bird.

    The icon that’s rendered is the “chain link”. Could my theme be the issue?

    Liked by 5 people

  23. finchnwren Jul 10th at 8:30 pm

    Thank you for a great widget! Love it and its appearance in my sidebar.

    I’d love to request that it be set up so that when readers click on the icons, it takes them to a new tab rather than opening it in the same tab. If possible!

    Liked by 6 people

  24. thedreamerlife2017 Jul 11th at 3:00 pm

    Very useful.. love it , thank you so much Kathryn..

    Liked by 4 people

  25. Lyagushka (Meirav) Jul 13th at 11:24 am

    Thank you for this nice new addition! One small comment though – as someone who’s very active on Google+ I have to say the icon you’re using is really weird, it wouldn’t make a G+ user think that that’s what it is, it’s just a plain G for Google without the +. If you have a look at any Google+ profile you’ll see that the icon in current use is a red capital G with a + sign. (link to my profile in case it’s of help: http://google.com/+MeiravMBerale)

    Liked by 4 people

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