Integrate social media on your website via helpful Drupal 8 modules

Feb 26, 2020

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Integrate social media on your website in Drupal 8

New days mean new rules on the web. Having social media integration buttons on your website today is one of the crucial web design tips to ensure your business success.

If you have a website on Drupal, this post will be of special interest to you. We will discuss how social media integration works in Drupal 8, what modules are available, and how to integrate social media on your website using one of them — the Easy Social Drupal module.

The importance of integrating social media

If you want to fully reap the benefits of social media marketing, you need to rely on these small website elements, which can be your huge business boosters:

content sharing buttons
buttons linking to your social accounts
tweetable lines in your content
feeds
counters

and more.

They help you engage more customers across multiple channels, increase your campaign visibility, improve your communication with your audience, boost your SEO, raise your brand awareness, make your site user-friendly, and much more. Social integration buttons are also indispensable elements of the contact block on every modern website.

Social media integration in Drupal 8

Any kind of third-party integration in Drupal 8 is easy to set up thanks to its API-first principle. Social integration is no exception — on the contrary, it is one of the easiest integrations to perform. This is thanks to helpful contributed modules.

Useful Drupal 8 modules for social media integration

Some of these Drupal 8 modules to integrate social media on your website are cross-network — they help you add blocks of buttons, feeds, links, counters, or social login options for multiple networks at once:

There also are Drupal 8 modules specifically tailored to the integration with particular networks (sharing content, adding feeds, and more):

Social integration via the Easy Social module in Drupal 8

The Easy Social module justifies its name — it allows you to set up your integration buttons with no fuss and no need to add external JavaScript libraries or other modules. The classic set of the most popular buttons is available both as a Drupal block or as a Views field.

Enabling the Easy Social module

When installed, the module offers an additional demonstration module — the Easy Social Example. You can choose whether to enable the latter.

Enabling the social widgets

At the module’s configuration page (Configuration — Web services — Easy Social) you will see the default widgets that can be enabled:

Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Google+ (included, but has reached its end-of-life)

There is also the option to load JavaScript asynchronously, which is recommended for performance purposes.

Enabling the social widgets in the Easy Social Drupal 8 module

Configuring the social widgets

Each widget has a tab where it can be configured individually. You can play with their color schemes, fonts, size, screen names, layout styles, types of actions (sharing or sending), the option to show the profile pictures of friends who liked this content, and so on. The available settings vary from widget to widget.

Adding the social share block

Now that the widgets are selected, we will place our sharing buttons block on the website just like we would do with any other Drupal block. By going to Structure — Place block, we will choose the region to place it in. Next to the necessary region, we will click “Place block” and find the “Easy Social” block on the available list. Another click on the “Place block” and, finally, on the “Save” button is all that's left.

When configuring the block, we can select the content types and pages to display it on, and user roles to display it to. The block title can be renamed to anything we would want users to see when they are supposed to share your content.

Configuring the social share block in Drupal 8

OK, that’s it! So we now see the sharing buttons below our Drupal content items:

Content node with social share buttons in Drupal 8

Let our team do the smooth integration for you!

The above example of how to integrate social media on your website was just a very simple one. Any integrations you wish are possible with the help of our Drupal development team — with any networks and featuring any settings.

If there is no contributed Drupal module that does the integration job, our team can write you a custom one. We can also apply design tweaks in accordance with your branding.

Integrate your website with social media easily — contact us!