Businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon and executing several social media strategies by posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and many more! The goal behind this is to be present everywhere their customers are. But not many people focus on how to integrate social media with their websites, are you one of them?
Obviously social media is one of the most efficient ways of marketing your business but don’t forget, your website is the place where your customers are converted and sales are driven. However, if you want to build a strong online reputation and spread brand awareness, you need to make sure that all your online strategies should work in sync.
Presenting here a simple how-to guide that will make sure that your website and social media strategies are working together to maximize benefits! In simple words, how to make your website more social!
How To Make Your Website More Social?
As stated by Paul Boag, every website must be the hub of social interaction instead of just sidelines! Social media integration has the potential to drive sales and allow customers to interact with their friends and family!
Here are my favorite tools that make your website more social!
1. Social Sharing Widgets:
We all know sharing is caring, right? With around 22 billion shares viewed daily online, social sharing widgets must now be overlooked when it comes to making your website social media-friendly. With technology becoming wiser, people are getting smarter. They are passionate about what interests them and what don’t! Social Sharing is one of the most effective ways of getting referral traffic to your website.
Adding social sharing widgets make your content more shareable and not only increases brand awareness but also improves user experience. But to maximize the effectiveness of social sharing buttons, you must select the most preferred social networks and also place them at easy to find places on your website.
If you find this solution very time consuming, try Social9.com. Here you will get easy-to-use social sharing plugins for almost all CMSs including WordPress social sharing, Drupal social sharing, and many more! Apart from the main site, don’t forget to add these widgets to your blog, email newsletter, resources, etc.
2. Offer Social Login:
73% of users prefer social login over traditional email registration process which makes it one of the most essential tools for your website, after all, can you afford to lose those 73% users? Social login lets your website visitors authenticate themselves using their existing social identities eliminating the need to create yet another site specific username and password. Not only does it simplifies the whole time-consuming customer registration process, but also provides you reliable first party social data that can help you to make more targeted strategies.
To offer flexibility, provide users the choice between traditional email registration and social login and what else! Sit back and enjoy numerous sign-ups!
3. Social Based Commenting:
With social-based commenting like Disqus, Facebook comments, you can make the commenting experience more engaging and convenient. Many e-commerce websites require commenters to link on of their social media accounts to the tool so that the profile looks genuine. It not only helps you to filter out the spammers but also makes the whole commenting process more social.
4. Social Proof:
If they don’t trust you they won’t buy from you! That’s the harsh reality. When the user arrives on your website, show them what people are saying about your brand and why they should choose you. It’s simple, by integrating social proof to your site, you are building trust. 79% of customers trust social proof equally as personal recommendations which makes it essential for you to add appropriate social proof to your website in order to drive sales and profile. Here are some ways to add social proof to your website:
Embedded posts from Twitter and Facebook
Whitepapers and Case studies
Social Counters
Testimonials
Here are some websites with the great social media integration: (Source)
1. ReDay :
ReDay is an interactive project against the addictions of drugs. Their way of integrating social media into this project is to convince users to follow their project on social profiles.
2. IBM :
The microsite, CMO and CIO Leadership Exchange sets a great example here. It aggregates content from social networks, blogs using multiple hashtags and contributes to the conversation directly from their website.
No business online presence should end on their social media profiles, but making the website social media friendly will not only drive social media traffic but also, as I said before, give your website a social life. Are there any tools I missed or which website do you like when it comes to social media integration? Feel free to mention in the comments below.