Showing off the number of followers or fans from your social networks is one of great ways to build trust to your readers. Some new visitors will be looking for these numbers to see how popular your site is. Huge number of fans or followers will probably give good first impression to the new visitors. In today’s tutorial, we’ll show you how to showoff number of fans or followers from your social networks in plain text. This is great if you want to showoff the number of followers or fans you got in any post, page or even widget without using all those fancy widgets or social buttons. This also works best on your About page where you want to include your number of followers somewhere in the paragraph.
First, install and activate Subscribers Text Counter plugin.
On the plugin’s settings page, insert your Twitter, Facebook and/or Youtube username. Besides these 3 social networks, the plugin also allows you to show off the number of registered members on your WordPress site and the total number of followers you have from all the social networks. Too bad Google Plus isn’t supported at the moment but hopefully the plugin author can add support to it soon. For Twitter, there are additional steps where you need to create Cosumer Key and Consumer Secret from the Twitter Dev page. For better performance, the counters are cached in the database and will be refreshed every 2 hours. When you first install it or whenever you want to counters to be refreshed, simply hit the Refresh Counters Now button.
Displaying the Values
The plugin gives you flexibility to output the values of the counters using any of these methods:
- To display counters use following tags
twitter,facebook,youtube,wordpress,all - To display links use following tags:
twitterlink,facebooklink,youtubelink - In widget area use it like this:
%twitter% - In post/page content use it like this:
[stcounter type="twitter"] - In templates use it like this:
<?php echo stcounter('twitter') ?>
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