Guide to using the Monarch extension, which allows you to share your content on social networks

I'm going to introduce you to the Monarch extension and explain how to add the famous share buttons you see on many sites.

This is ideal if you have the profile of a content writer for your website and want to make it more widely known!

You probably want to maximise your visibility even more and I'm sure that's what prompted you to visit this article.

The advantage of opting for an extension of this type is to encourage visitors to your site and readers of your content to share your pages and blog posts on their social networks.

This can greatly help you to improve your visibility and generate traffic to your website.

If you need support in designing a website or adding extensions, do not hesitate to call on a web development provider.

Announcement: this article contains affiliate links that you will easily recognise. The classic links are in purple and sponsored links are in pink.

Guest article by Zakaria from Baleez.

Where can I get the Monarch extension?

So you are probably looking for a quality extension to add this social sharing functionality to your website and let me tell you that Monarch is an excellent choice.

This extension is "free", let's say it is included when you take out a licence with Elegant themes (for life or for the year), just like Bloom.

Indeed, Elegant themes offers a package when you buy its premium theme Divi and in which you find Monarch, the plugin for sharing on social networks.

If you don't have your licence yet, please read the article that explains how much does Divi cost according to the licences.

From now on, for the rest of this tutorial, I will consider that you have the Monarch extension installed and activated on your WordPress site.

I would advise you to eventually add a "draft" page and post from your WordPress interface so that you can test without having to touch your existing pages.
In my case, as the site is blank, I will settle for a simple home page and a basic article designed by default on WordPress.

Did you know? You can test Divi for free by visiting on this page and clicking on "TRY IT FOR FREE

The features offered by the Monarch plugin

Is your extension now installed and activated?
Great, I suggest you go to the settings of this plugin by clicking on "Settings" or from the Tools > Monarch Settings tab of your WordPress administration.

You should now be on an orange interface with several settings tabs on the left side:

• Social Sharing
• Rentals
• Networks
• Social follow
• General Settings
• Etc.

Locations tab

Let's start this tutorial by reviewing the Social Sharing.

This tab is made up of several headings which we will see and I invite you to go to the first one which is entitled "Rentals".

You must therefore first choose the position(s) you want (you can select one or more).

There are various possibilities for location, such as :

• Sidebar,
• Inline,
• Pop up,
• Fly In,
• Media.

You can have an overview of how it looks depending on the location you choose.

Depending on your type of site, your graphic charter or other, you must make your choice so that the buttons fit in the best way on your pages.

In my case, I'm going to start with something quite simple and classic: the sidebar that I'm going to apply only to my blog posts.

I would like to point out that this type of functionality offered by Monarch is more suitable for blogging, i.e. for the integration of buttons on your blog posts.

It's probably less sensible and interesting for you to do this on your general pages, but if you need to, you can do it and we'll look at it together.

Networks tab

This is the central and probably one of the most important parts of the extension, the "Networks" section.
This is where you can define which networks you want to add to your button block and let me tell you, you are spoilt for choice on the networks available.

I invite you to click on "Add networks" to add your favourite networks.

Then you just have to choose the ones you want to add to your social network block.

For my part, I chose to add Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Don't forget to save the edits you make in the extension's sections before leaving them, by clicking on "Save changes".

Monarch Icon Settings

Let's move on to the settings that can be made for the icons. In order to simplify this tutorial, we will only deal with the "Sidebar" section here, because it is the most common and because the other sections (Inline, Pop up, Fly in, On media) are relatively very similar to the "Sidebar" section.

Here are the 5 sub-headings of "Sidebar" that you can find as main settings:

• Icon styles
• Choice of icon
• Display settings
• Colour settings
• Post type settings

Icon style

Here you have 5 choices to define the style of the icons as well as their appearance on mouse-over.

Icon selection

You can also set your preferred icon to one of three choices: square, square with rounded edges and circle.

Saving my current settings and going to my draft blog post, this is what it looks like now.

Monarch display settings

You have the possibility to manage several elements in the settings part of the display.

As you may have noticed, the extension is currently in English. I dare to hope that one day the editor will propose a multilingual version of the extension with French included. For the moment, don't worry, there is, in fact, nothing really bad and if you are unsure about some terms, a little translation at our friend Google and the matter is settled 😉

Back to our subject, the extension proposes to regulate mainly :

• Display side of the bar
• Animation
• Show (or hide) the counter and the total number of shares
• Display an additional button to share on other networks than the ones initially planned
• Adding spacing
• Hide on mobiles

Sub-settings may appear depending on the boxes you tick.
I invite you to browse through the various possibilities according to your needs and also to test to see what it looks like on your pages.

Colour settings

As you might expect, here we can make adjustments to the colours of our share buttons.

Personally, I advise you to leave the default settings, as visitors are used to seeing the familiar and widespread colours of social networks, such as the dark blue of Facebook, the light blue of Twitter, the red of Pinterest, etc.

However, you can also use the colours of your graphic charter, as here on Astuces Divi, you can then :

• Change the background colour and also the hover colour
• Change the colour of the icon and also the hover colour

Post type settings

To finish this section on the different settings possible for the icons, the extension allows you to define on which pages you wish to display your button block on your site.

By default, the extension checks "Post" and "Page", but I recommend that you only leave "Post" checked. This is because, as we've seen, this type of extension is actually more suited to sharing blog posts and it may not make sense for you to display this across your entire site. However, you do have the ability to define on which pages to display your buttons if the need arises.

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Main settings tab (general settings)

Last tab proposed by the extension: the main settings. Nothing special here.

In particular, you can manage :

• Frequency of meter updates
• Link your extension to the Facebook API
• Adding additional CSS code

Social follow tab

To finish this tutorial, you should know that the Monarch extension also offers the possibility to add, in addition to your share buttons, icons to follow you on your social networks. You can find this feature in the "Social Follow" tab.

The settings are very similar to those of the "Social Sharing" tab that we have seen in detail in this tutorial. If you have understood what we have seen together so far, you should have no problems setting up the "Social Follow" tab.

Finally, note that once you have defined your networks for the "Social Follow", you have two possibilities to integrate them on your pages:

• As a widget (to be added from the Appearance > Widgets tab)
• Via shortcode (code to be integrated in the desired places on your pages)

Please feel free to use the comments area if you have any questions on these points, I will be happy to help you.

Statistics tab

Once your buttons are installed on your site (sharing & tracking), don't forget to check your statistics regularly.

Monarch a practical and easy to set up sharing extension...

To finish this article, I want to share with you my impressions on this extension. I personally find it very interesting and if you use the Divi theme (logically yes), you will not be disoriented.

Indeed, being also developed by Elegant themes, you will find a style similar to that of Divi or its cousin, the Bloom extension which manages the Opt-In (newsletter).

Moreover, I find it very easy to use, which makes it even more accessible.

If necessary, remember that a specialized WordPress agency can accompany you if you need to install a theme like Divi or an extension like Monarch.