In this episode, we walk you through the Elegant Themes social share/follow plugin Monarch. Explore the features and learn what can be done using this great plugin. It doesn’t hurt that it’s included with your purchase of the Divi Theme.
Keegan 0:00
In today’s episode we’re going to be talking about monarch a social sharing plugin from Elegant Themes.
Keegan 0:15
Alright, Divi addicts, we’re back here, this is Episode 5.4 of the Divi addicts podcast, we’re happy to get into this one. We’re super excited about this one because we do love community we do love building and connecting and spending time on Twitter and just interacting with every one of you. It’s it’s honestly like what kind of do for fun is where does that make sound. But today, you know, in the vein of keeping things very Divi centric, and we’re talking about a plugin here that specifically from Elegant Themes. So if you spend $89 a year with them, and have their membership, you have access to this plugin, if you bought the lifetime from Elegant Themes, you’ve also got access to this. So you can go over to Elegant Themes.com log into your account, download the monarch plugin and install it in your WordPress site and get started today, we’re going to talk about some of the features that it has, and realistically why you should be using it.
Keegan 1:13
So they touted as the best social media sharing plugin for WordPress, that may be a little bit of them tooting their own horn. So I’m not sure that that’s necessarily the case. But it is a phenomenal, phenomenal plugin. As you go through this plugin, there’s a lot of things that can be done with it. You know, ideally, it’s designed to increase sharing, it has a phenomenal design, and you have customization over how it looks on the front end, you can put it in a lot of different places. And we’ll get into some of those. And it really is it is super fast, I will give them that.
Keegan 1:46
There’s over 20 social networks to choose from with the monarch plugins. You’ve got Pinterest, and Twitter, and blogger and Facebook and rip Google Plus, you’ve got Tumblr, Digg, LinkedIn, my space, if you still use my space buffer, there’s a tons of I mean tons of different ones you’ve also got where you can directly email it to somebody you can save to Evernote. And there’s even just a like feature where you can you know, throw hearts at people. But there’s multiple locations where you can share this, you can have it as a floating sidebar, and you can customize the way it looks. You can round them, you can create space between the buttons, you can make them circles, you can do you make it fit the design of your site, you can also keep them looking like they’re normal colors for the brands themselves. So the Facebook blue, the Twitter blue, the Pinterest red, or you can make them blend seamlessly into the design of your site with some custom colors.
Keegan 2:39
You also have the option to go above or below your content on your blog posts. This is pretty cool, because it means you’ll have your feature image up top, the title, the meta, and then you can have the sharing right underneath that right before your post starts. And you have the option to pick either below or below or above the content or both. You can also have share ability directly on images and videos. I personally have never used this one, I’m not sure. And maybe there are some cases where you would use it. If you have a case where it is hit us up on Twitter at Keegan elmedia. And let us know what your thoughts are on using it for images and videos. Because I don’t know that we would ever use it in that way. There’s also automatic pop ups. So it’ll let you create these automatic pop ups that can be triggered either by time delay, or when a user reaches the bottom of your post. But they’re really cool, it’s effective, and it just pops up and says share this page. If you liked this post, let your people know about it.
Keegan 3:42
And then there’s also automatic flying. So similar to the trigger pop ups fly ants are a really cool way to grab people’s attention, I’ll just kind of pop up in the bottom of the page. And they can be triggered by time delay page location or when the user’s mouse is leaving the page. So that’s that’s pretty cool, right? I mean, you got a lot of different ways some of those triggers, like it could be bottom of the post, it can even be after they comment, or upon percentage of scroll down the page or it even says the after purchases or after inactivity. That’s pretty sweet.
Keegan 4:14
And yeah, there’s 35 different social networks to choose from. You can place follow buttons. So this is like part of the following right? I can put follow buttons on the page or in a widget area or display the follow with a shortcode which I wish that I wish there was a shortcode for the social sharing as well, especially with Divi’s with their their new Theme Builder that’s coming you know in just a matter of weeks. And just the way the visual builder has grown with diamond dynamic content and all those things. Having a shortcode for monarch would be a huge huge win.
Keegan 4:48
We talked about customization, you can display network names and social accounts on on your icons if you want to pick the icon orientation either on the left and the top. You can make it to where the name shows up. Once you hover over it, there’s a lot of customization. There’s also, it’s mobile friendly. So it’ll show at the bottom, share this and then a menu will pop up, works extremely well. And then you can really check your stats, you can import and export data. And then you’ve always got elegant theme support, if anything just happens to go wrong.
Keegan 5:21
But there are so many things that you can do with this. And the dashboard is phenomenal. It gives you all the information you’re going to need as far as how many shares you’ve had. And it’s just that’s behind the social sharing and the way people have interacted with your version of monarch. So it’s huge. It’s a great plugin. And it’s one that I think really does help up the game when it comes to blog posts and just being able to share out with the world. So if you’re not familiar with monarch, or you’ve never used monarch, it’s a great value, add to the Elegant Themes membership. So it was definitely a big key in me wanting to get the lifetime version of Divi way back in 2016 monarch was one of those things, Bloom was another one and just the versatility of the Divi Builder in itself was was huge. But monarch played a piece in me deciding to pull the trigger and actually go all in on Elegant Themes, and Divi is a platform.
Keegan 6:16
So I really hope that that you’ve enjoyed this, I hope that it’s kind of shine a light on monarch and some things that you can do to get additional value from your Elegant Themes membership. If you don’t have an elegant themes, membership, and you’re interested, there’s a link to it in the show notes below. It is our affiliate link, it won’t cost you any extra won’t cost you any less. But it will help support the show. So if you feel like supporting Feel free to click the link in the show notes. And it will take you directly to Elegant Themes where you can sign up, join the community. And then be sure to go over to Facebook, just search for Divi groups. There’s a ton of them. They’re very welcoming, extremely friendly people. So be sure to jump all in on the community and they will be sure to help you out.
Keegan 6:56
If you have questions or anything that we might be able to help you out with. Feel free to jump over to Twitter at Keegan elmedia, interact with us. There’s a corresponding YouTube channel you can search for Keegan Lanier media. And you’ll find a ton of videos that help expand on Divi and WordPress in general, and we’d be happy to hang ou,t talk in the comments below those videos. So feel free. But until the next episode, we’re going to be coming back with episode number five of season five we’re going to talk about building an email list specifically with the bloom plugin. I can’t talk today specifically with the bloom plugin by Elegant Themes take you as much better we appreciate you for being here. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and we will catch you in the next episode.