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Monarch, a Robust Social Media Sharing Plugin for Marketing

Integrating your website with social media is inevitable, especially if you use your website for a business purpose. Providing social media sharing buttons will make it easy for your visitors to share the article they are reading or a product they are seeing. Monarch is one of the plugins that allow you to provide social media sharing buttons to your WordPress-based website.

Monarch is especially a great social media sharing plugin for a marketing purpose as it comes with an analytics feature.

A Brief Intro About Monarch

Monarch is a social media sharing plugin developed by Elegant Themes, the developer of Divi Builder and Divi Theme. Monarch is a paid plugin. To get the plugin, you need to be a paid subscriber of Elegant Themes that costs $89 per year (or $249 for a one-time purchase option). The Elegant Themes membership allows you to download all products developed by Elegant Themes, not limited to Monarch. The products are:

  • Divi Builder
  • Divi Theme
  • Extra Theme
  • Monarch
  • Bloom

Monarch Review

Social media sharing buttons on a website are not accessories. They are part of the marketing tools. They allow visitors to share a page more easily. Monarch allows you to add the social media sharing buttons to a wide range of content types on your website. From pages, articles, to products. You can even add social media sharing buttons to media elements (such as images).

The social media sharing buttons of Monarch are customizable. You can select which social media platforms you want to provide the buttons of, set the colors, set the icon style, and so on. More importantly, Monarch has a default analytics feature that allows you to monitor the sharing stats.

Here are some key features offered by Monarch.

Customizable Social Media Sharing Buttons

To start using Monarch, you need to set where you want to display the social media sharing buttons. Monarch allows you to display the social media sharing buttons on the following locations.

  • Sidebar
  • Inline
  • Popup
  • Fly-in
  • Media
Popup locations supported by Monarch

You can display the social media sharing buttons on multiple locations according to your needs. Once you are done setting locations, you can set the social media platforms you want to display the buttons of. There are about 24 social media platforms supported by Monarch.

Social Media Networks Supported by Monarch

Some social media platforms that basically no longer exist (such as Google Plus) are still available on the list. So, you need to a bit thorough when selecting social media platforms. Oddly enough that there is no WhatsApp available on the list. The Elegant Themes might consider it a chat app instead of a social media platform. Just for comparison, WhatsApp — as well as other chat apps like LINE and Telegram — are available in AddThis.

Monarch allows you to use a different style for the social media sharing buttons on each location. Each location has a separate setting block.

There are four button (icon) styles offered by Monarch for each location. There are also three icon shapes you can choose from. By default, each icon has a background according to the official color of the social media platform it belongs to (such as light blue for Twitter and red for Pinterest). But you can customize the background color as well as the icon color to your liking.

Sticky Social Media Sharing Button

Monarch allows you to save the settings you made into an external file and import the settings on other Monarch installs on different domains. The settings file is stored in a JSON format.

Built-in Analytics

As mentioned earlier, Monarch comes with a default analytics feature that allows you to check the sharing stats. You can click the analytics icon (right-most) on the top bar of the Monarch settings panel. On the top section, the stats display the all-time sharing performance. You can see the number of total shares, total likes, and activities. You can check the stats per location by selecting a location from the dropdown menu.

Built-in Analytics Feature of Monarch

To check total shares within a week, a month, and a year, you can simply scroll down your mouse. On the bottom section, you can see which articles have most shares.

Update

If you buy Monarch with a subscription model, you will receive updates during the active license period. If you buy Monarch with a one-time purchase option, Elegant Themes offers lifetime updates. To get the update notifications, you need to connect your website with your Elegant Themes account.

The Verdict

Monarch is one of the recommended items if you are looking for a social media sharing plugin for a marketing purpose. It comes with analytics feature to allow you to monitor the sharing performance of your website content. The social media sharing buttons/icons are also customizable and you can display them on 5 different locations.

The price of Monarch is a bit expensive but crucial to note that the subscription plan offered by Elegant Themes allows you to download all products developed by Elegant Themes, not just Monarch. Plus, you can use each product on unlimited websites, not just one website.

A downside of Monarch is that it still preserves social media platforms such as Google Plus that basically no longer exist. Also, it doesn’t support app chat apps like WhatsApp, LINE, and Telegram.

PS

Monarch can be installed on any WordPress theme, not just themes developed by Elegant Themes.

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Aliko Sunawang

Aliko Sunawang

Aliko is a WordPress expert and lead blogger at WPPagebuilders. He has been blogging with WordPress since 2012. He is responsible of all content published on this website.
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