Am I missing something? I don't see how jQuery is necessary for something like this (maybe if it was at least showing number of shares/likes).

Sorry for the shameless plug, but if anyone finds this useful, you should check out https://github.com/fourtonfish/SimpleSharingButtons

This links to a template (no JavaScript, just simple HTML) you can download and use (and of course extend with your fancy JavaScript library of choice), but there is also a link to a very easy to use generator, so you can just plug in a link to your content, choose from a few styles of buttons (for now it's using images, I am planning on adding an option to choose an icon font, most likely Font Awesome).

I also wrote a rather extensive blog post (link on the generator's page) which shows how to create sharing links for even more websites that the generator doesn't support (missing icons/images).