What Are Grow Social and Grow Social Pro?

We can’t start a blog post about why you should use Grow Social Pro without first discussing what it is.

At its core, Grow by Mediavine^® is a WordPress plugin that provides social sharing buttons for bloggers using the WordPress platform.

That being said, once you upgrade to Grow Social Pro, it becomes so much more than that!

Hi! I’m Sam Seeley, Product Manager for Grow here to talk to you all about Grow Social and Grow Social Pro.

For starters, Grow by Mediavine^® encompasses a couple of different products, so I wanted to make sure to clarify them for you here:

Grow Social is the free version of our WordPress plugin. It can be installed on your WordPress website by visiting the WordPress plugin repository and adding the plugin to your WordPress admin.

Grow Social Pro is the premium version that unlocks some stellar features, such as the ability to set custom images for Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, as well as the ability to add hidden Pinterest images to your blog post.

With Grow Social, you can:

Grow Social makes it easy for your reads to be, well, social.

• Use Mobile Sticky Footer Social Share Buttons — Make your website mobile-friendly with sticky footer buttons.
• Add Pop-Up Social Share Buttons — Trigger a pop-up with the social sharing buttons when a user starts to scroll, arrives at the bottom of a post or begins to leave your site.

By adding social media icons to the most popular platforms in the most engaged places on your sites, Grow Social encourages readers to share your content.

With Grow Social Pro, you are able to:

Grow Social Pro helps your readers easily share your content with their networks, plus it gives you access to some really cool customization features and analytics tools as well. (And who doesn’t love analytics, right?)

• Customize Social Content — Set custom open graph data (description and images) for social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
• Click to Tweet — Let your readers easily share a custom tweet with just one click.
• Reach more people by adding a multitude of social share networks including Reddit, VK, Yummly, WhatsApp, Buffer, Telegram, Flipboard, Pocket, Tumblr and email.
• Track using Google Analytics — Track the source of your incoming traffic with help from the Google Analytics UTM parameters.
• Use the Follow Buttons Widget — Attract users to your social media profiles with our [socialpug_follow] shortcode. Place it in your template files or anywhere on your site. Buttons include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Twitch, Yummly and Behance.
• Shorten Links — Mask long URLs using a shorter version with our Bitly and Branch integrations.
• Recover Share Counts — If you upgraded from HTTP to HTTPS and lost your social share counts, they can be recovered with Grow.
• Access Mediavine Support — Access Mediavine’s award-winning Support team for help with technical issues, questions or feedback.

For a full list of features, and to purchase the plugin (it’s only $34 a year, what a steal!), you’ll want to head over to the Mediavine Marketplace.

Why Should You Try Grow Social Pro?

Grow has quite a few features that I, as a blogger myself, use daily within my blogging workflow.

My workflow looks something like this:

• Write and finalize the draft.
• Gather imagery.
• Write Pinterest and open graph descriptions, then place within the post (this is where Grow comes in to play).
• Create Pinterest-worthy images.
• Upload the pins I created to my media library and insert them within the post editor via Grow Social Pro.

In addition to providing social share buttons for over 10 networks, if you’re looking to level up your Pinterest game, Grow Social Pro has the options you’re looking for.

For Grow Social Pro + Pinterest, you have the ability to:

• Add custom Pinterest and hidden Pinterest images.
• Add a Pinterest hover button to your images within the post content.
• Set Pinterest descriptions for specific images within the media library or within the post editor.
• Set a Pin repin ID.
• Disable specific images so they are not pinnable.

If you’re still using code to add your hidden Pinterest images, you might be surprised by how quickly you can add them using Grow Social Pro.

Pinterest no longer reliably supports Custom Descriptions and will now be prioritizing Open Graph Data (og:description) to pull in descriptions. You can add this to your site in the Social Media Descriptions field of Grow: Share Options. We’re leaving the Custom Descriptions field in case Pinterest changes their mind.

Note: If you’re looking for Grow.me, our social bookmarking tool, you’ll want to head over to read these posts (and hopefully, sign up for the beta):

• Grow.me – The Future of Grow
• What Is Grow.Me?
• First Party Data: Why It’s Crucial and Why Grow.Me Is the Future