For many marketers, social media is integrated in almost every aspect of their marketing campaigns, which is a great way to leverage the power of social media to increase awareness of your marketing efforts. But while brands invest so much time and effort into social media integration of their initiatives, many miss out on the one of the biggest ways to showcase the business’s social savvy—the website.
Social media and your website should work seamlessly together to promote your online brand. We’ve talked about how to boost your website traffic with social media, so in this post we’ll be talking about social media integration on your website to help your social media presence be more visible.
Social share and follow buttons
Make your content shareable with social share buttons. Not only do they help you increase awareness of your content, but when you provide your visitors the opportunity to share your content easily, you’re also improving user experience. When choosing social share buttons, make sure you only choose the social networks that matter to you. By keeping it simple and easy, you’ll be able to increase the probability of your content being shared. Best practices recommend that social share buttons are placed at the top, bottom, or along the side of your page. Make sure to also include social follow buttons to increase your social media following. If you look to the right of your page, go ahead and follow us!
Use social sharing widgets like Shareaholic
Social login
Did you know that 73% of users prefer to log in to a site with social login, as opposed to providing an email address and creating a new account. Improve your website visitors’ experience with social login, and increase your website registration conversions and retention. When you provide visitors the opportunity to sign up or log in via their social media profiles you’re shortening the registration process, which tends to lead to an increase in the conversion rate for user registrations. With the social data you collect through social login platforms, like LoginRadius, you’re able to collect more than 200 data points to help you make more personalized campaigns.
This is a social login product by LoginRadius
Social Video
Social videos are videos that are created and shared on social networks. The added bonus of social videos for marketers is that they provide an easy social media integration for your website. With so many social media platforms including video in the mix, it would be a missed opportunity to not include your social videos on your website too. For example, here at Hootsuite we like to use Vine videos to showcase quick how-to videos. Not only are these videos great on Vine, but they also make how-to blog posts more engaging.
Instagram photos
This social media integration feature is perfect for those of you who want to showcase your Instagram photos on your website. If you’re also trying to increase your Instagram following, embedding your Instagram photos in blog posts allows you to capture new followers from your website visitors. Below, you can see if you click on the the three little dots on the bottom right corner you’ll be able to retrieve the embed code for your Instagram image.
This image shows you how to retrieve the embed code for the Instagram images you want to include on your website.
Social Proof
Simply put, when you integrate social proof to your website you’re providing your visitors the opportunity to trust you more. With 79% of consumers trusting social proof as much as personal recommendations, it’s important you integrate the proper social widgets on your website to increase sales and website conversions. One way to do this is to use one of Facebook’s social widgets, such as the “Like Box”. This feature shows your visitors that you’re a credible source, their friends also like your Facebook page, and that you’re a legitimate product or brand. On top of that, you’ll also be able to increase your Facebook likes with this social media integration.
Below are 3 websites that have been listed as some of the best websites with social media integration by AWWWARDS. The awards that recognize the talent and effort of the best web designers, developers, and agencies in the world.
Bonobo Jeans’ interactive catalogue is responsive and social. Their site provides their visitor to share what they are shopping for on social, which helps increase awareness of their products and sales.
This is website is an interactive project against drugs and addiction. They integrate social media in this project by providing their visitors to follow them on their social profiles.
Cinderella Past midnight combines original illustrations, typography, GIF sets, and images from the film to create an engaging narrative, interactive and social user experience. The site is hosted on Tumblr, which has strong social media integration.
Your social media presence doesn’t have to end on your social profile. By making your website more social media-friendly, you’ll not only increase traffic to your site via social, but you’ll also increase your social media following via your website. When the two work together, you’ve got yourself a strong team to drive your overall online presence.
Wasn’t that fun to learn about how to integrate social media on your website, and to be inspired by some very talented web designers who created websites with strong social media integration? Do you know of more ways you can integrate social media on a website? Share them in the comments below.
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