Because of their increase in popularity, social media have become an important avenue to drive business exposure and brand awareness.
Despite this, many businesses are missing out on opportunities to extend their reach by not utilising the potential that Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networks offer.
After setting up your social media channels, the next logical step is to integrate your website with those precious social platforms and to make interacting with your company, sharing content and building a following intuitive and easy.
The following simple guidelines can help to improve your digital marketing strategy by providing some key steps to social media integration for your business website.
1. Social Media Links
The easiest way to include your social profiles is simply by linking to them. If possible, try to add consistent links to all your website’s pages. The header or footer can often be used for this purpose.
It might be a good idea to have the social media links opening up in new windows or tabs when clicked so that your website remains visible and returning to your site is easy once your visitors are finished with their social media interactions.
Using the popular social icons instead of text links might also be beneficial as they are well recognised and add to a more professional and coherent visual appeal.
2. Social Sharing Buttons
You find them everywhere on all kinds of websites – social media sharing buttons. Often placed at the very top or bottom of pages, they make it easy for your website visitors to share what they find on your website through their preferred social site. People are getting used to this single-click process, and it is likely to become more and more intuitive for many of us.
Adding sharing buttons can be as easy as adding a code snippet or plug-in to your website. Your web designer will be able to assist if you require some help with this process.
3. Social Widgets
You have probably come across these boxes on some websites that show the most recent Twitter or Facebook posts in a scrollable list. Most social media sites offer these so-called widgets which can be easily integrated into your website by copying & pasting some code provided by the social channel into your own website.
The benefit of this integration is that after being set up, there is virtually no more work needed to show the latest social media posts on your website in real-time. It also increases awareness of your social profiles and content campaigns.
However, a major disadvantage of widgets is that the look and feel usually does not fit in well with the rest of your website, and in most cases, widgets make use of I-frames, an outdated coding technique, which search engines do not index as content belonging to your website.
4. Social Media Feeds
Often, social media feeds require the expertise of an experienced web designer to be set up, but they are well worth it. A live feed from your social media channels is used to stream content onto your website.
While the styling can be matched 100% to suit your site, the feed content becomes part of your website’s actual content which is something that search engines love. This means a simple post to your Facebook page automatically results in a content update on your website. Placed in the right location, these continuous changes can make your site appear live, vibrant and up-to-date in the eyes of visitors and search engines alike.
We here at F1RST are happy to help with any of the mentioned social media integrations. It makes sense to utilise social media wherever you can as they can broaden your reach and can be hugely influential in terms potential customers. For further questions, assistance or advice, please get in touch with us.
