Monarch is a social media plugin for Divi and WordPress that allows you to add social share buttons to your website.
The Bloom plugin adds share buttons to your website for up to 20 popular social networks, such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. When someone clicks the button they can share with their followers and friends.
Monarch is one of the Divi plugins, along with the Bloom plugin and the Divi Builder plugin, that is included in the Elegant Themes membership plan.
Monarch is created by Elegant Themes and integrates seamlessly with the Divi Theme, but can also be used on any WordPress website.
So, why the wait? Let’s do a Monarch plugin review and learn how you can use it for social sharing on your Divi website.
What is Monarch?
Monarch by Elegant Themes is one of the best social media WordPress plugins. By using Monarch, you can instantly see a surge in social sharing. In addition, it offers excellent design and minimizes your site’s loading time.
Monarch supports more than 20+ social networks. This means you can target all social media platforms without worrying about their support. It also gives you flexibility when it comes to customization, including choosing between popups, inline sharing buttons, social sharing sidebars, and fly boxes.
In the end, you give your audience the best tools to share your content through Monarch, as it visually makes it easy for them to do so. As a result, you get more shares, a better social media audience, and an increase in social media followers. Using its statistics, you can also effectively know how Monarch is helping you grow.
It is also suitable with other WordPress ecosystems, including Divi. So, if you are using Divi, you can fully utilize Monarch to give your site the best way to reach your audience through the social plugin.
Why should you use Monarch?
Using a modern Divi/WordPress theme, you get basic social media sharing options directly built in. However, they are not as extensive or customizable as dedicated social sharing plugins such as Monarch.
Monarch is a standalone social sharing plugin that makes it easy for you to customize your social sharing options on your site.
With it, you can trigger social sharing popups and fly-ins and trigger them according to the user’s behavior.
So, why should you use Monarch?
Monarch is a modern yet simple-to-use social sharing plugin. It offers every advantage that you should get from a social sharing plugin, including:
- Easily add social networks without slowing down the site.
- Enable visitors to share your content to the social site easily
- Improve your social media following
- Tons of customization to get it right with your WordPress/Divi theme
- Analytics to understand how to improve social media traffic
And much more!
Monarch’s ability to give you full control over social sharing makes it an excellent plugin.
Steps to get started with Monarch
To get started with Monarch, you need first to buy its license. Currently, Elegant Theme doesn’t offer to price for Monarch, and you need to either get yearly access or lifetime access(we discuss more its Monarch pricing in the pricing section).
Once you have the license, you need to download the plugin to your local computer. From there, upload, install, and activate the plugin.
With the plugin activated, you now need to follow the steps below.
1) Go to the Monarch settings.
2) Now select the location of the social sharing icons. You can choose from the sidebar, pop-up, fly-in, and media.
3) Next comes the Networks. Here, you get to add networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can add as many networks as you choose. This section also lets you drag and change the position of the network.
4) The Sidebar tabs give you plenty of options. Here, you can choose icon style and shape and change the display settings such as intro animation, sidebar orientation, etc. Apart from that, you can also change the color of each network.
5) Finally, you can change the post type settings, which will dictate where the social media icons will display.
You can choose between Sidebar, Inline, Popup, fly-in, and On media.
And, that’s it.
Social Sharing
As a website owner, you surely don’t want to customize each time you want to add a new network to your site. That’s why Monarch offers support to over 20 social networks from the onset. It supports the likes of popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and so on. You also get to add other platforms, including Aol, Yahoo, Evernote, Blogger, Vik, and so on.
You can create a custom collection of networks you want to display on your site.
Sharing Button Locations
As for locations, you get to choose five different locations. So, you can choose the location based on your needs. Monarch supports these five locations.
Floating Sidebar
The floating sidebar is one of the most common social button locations. It offers an effective way to grab users’ attention and works on all types of pages with a boxed layout. In addition, you can change between different hover styles.
On Images and Videos
If you have a site with a lot of images and videos, you may want to use the sharing button location on them. If you choose this option, the social share option will show when the user hovers over the image and videos and fade away when the user moves away their mouse.
Automatic Pop-Ups
Monarch’s automatic pop-ups are another way to grab visitors’ attention and ask them to share your post or page. You can set up the automatic pop-up to work after a delay or when the user reaches a certain part of the page. Intact, you can try to engage the audience even when they are about to leave.
Above & or Below Content
Most blogs require a clean yet effective way to engage their visitors and remind them to share the content. With the above and below content location, you can put the social media icons just before the content starts and once after the content ends. This is very effective for websites that constantly share content.
Automatic Fly-ins
Just like automatic pop-ups, you can also use automatic fly-ins to great effect. They are placed mostly on the side of the page. Just like fly-ins, you can also trigger them after a certain period, user’s mouse location, or page location.
Triggers
To give complete control of the behavior of the pop-ins and fly-ins, you get triggers. Monarch comes with six triggers that you can use with both pop-ins and fly-ins. These triggers include:
- Timed delay: With the timed delay, you can set up the fly-ins and popups to trigger after a certain period.
- After commenting: If your reader comments, you display the social sharing option. This way, you know that the visitor has read your content and would be more inclined to share your content.
- After Inactivity: You can also trigger the fly-ins and pop-ups after some inactivity of the user. This will not only re-engage them but also give them another way to interact with your website.
- Upon Scroll: With this trigger, you can show social media share buttons once the visitor crosses the page by a certain percentage by scrolling it.
- After purchasing: You can also put a trigger when a user makes a purchase. By doing so, you can showcase other offers or ask them to share their purchase.
- Bottom of Post: Lastly, you can trigger the pop-ups or fly-ins to activate when the user reaches the bottom of the post.
Display Your Follower Count
Apart from sharing your content on social media platforms, you can also showcase your social media numbers to your users. This way, you can show how popular you are on social media platforms and establish your authority.
For example, you can showcase stats from 35 social networks. All you need to do is enter the social media URL, which will draw the following counts automatically. You can also place the follow button on the Widget area using a short code.
Customizability
Monarch offers excellent customizability out of the box. We already covered the five social icon locations and the six triggers for fly-ins and popups. Apart from that, you can also choose the following:
- Three-button shapes
- Four inline buttons hover effects
- Five sidebar button hover effects
Apart from that, you can also pick icon orientation, either vertical or horizontal. In addition, you can also showcase the social counts for each of the added networks.
Lastly, you are free to pick your colors. You can leave them as native network colors or change them based on your brand design.
Monarch is mobile-friendly, and you can make it work on different types of screen sizes.
Monarch Dashboard
Monarch Dashboard offers an easy way to manage your social media sharing. Here, you get everything you want to set up and customize the social media plugin. You also get access to stats and data.
The key things that you can do with the Monarch dashboard include:
- Easily display setting configuration
- Statistics
- Import and export Monarch data
Support
Elegant themes offer extensive support for their plugins. Here, you get premium support from their Divi Support Center. They provide 24/7 support through chat boxes.
Monarch Plugin Pricing
Elegant themes sell their solutions as bundles. So, if you want to get only Monarch, you simply cannot get it. They offer yearly and lifetime access at $89 per year and $249. As you might have guessed, lifetime access is a one-time payment.
Once you get any of the plans, you get access to Monarch. In addition, you also get access to Divi, Bloom, and Extra.
Conclusion: Should you use Monarch?
Monarch is a handy social media plugin. It simplifies how you can integrate social media sharing icons, buttons, and pop-ups into your site. Moreover, Monarch’s excellent customizability means that you can decide how the social media icons behave, feel and interact with your audience.
So, what are you waiting for? Go try out Monarch now!
