Monday 13 April 2015

A Guide to Leveraging Social Media on Your Website

post thumbnail


A few years ago, businesses could get away with not integrating social media into the design of their website. The same can’t be said for today. Social media is a vital part of making your brand visible and driving conversions, and those who fail to jump on board fail to keep up with their competitors. If you want to make the most out of your website traffic, you’ll learn to leverage social media. Use these four tips to get you started.


1. Integrate Sharing Plugins


Social media is one of the largest hubs of activity in the world. Almost everyone has some form of social media account, and if you learn to control that market, your website can gain worldwide attention. Getting social media followers in some form is easy if you integrate sharing plugins into your website.


The trick is finding the right plugins for you. Many use a CMS to build their website, such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, and each of these systems has unique sharing plugins for your website. For example, Adam Connell of Blogging Wizard explored many different WordPress plugins in this blog post, and he concludes: “Whether it’s adding social share buttons, follower counts, encouraging social shares, or monitoring social shares…there’s a plugin for you.” It’s just a matter of determining the kind of plugin you want and finding the one that will work best for your purposes.


Once you’ve found the sharing plugins that work for you, make sure they’re visible. Avoid shoving them into the middle of a busy website. Best practices indicate placing these buttons near the top, bottom, or side of a web page; consumers will know to look there based off of traditional webpage setup. There’s not much point investing in social plugins if your consumer can’t find them with ease.


2. Combine Social and Email Marketing


Email marketing is as much of an important part of building and defining your online business as social media marketing, so it makes perfect sense to marry the two into one effective unit. In your social posts, invite your followers to subscribe to your weekly newsletters or specials, and in your emails include sharing buttons to enable easy sharing.


This will do two things: grow your audience and expand the reach of your brand. If your content for both the posts and emails are good, you’ll quickly gain a more devoted following and reach further than you ever have before when it comes to brand visibility.


3. Learn from Social Signals and Analysis


Gaining data and insights from your current strategies is the only way you can hope to improve your marketing schemes, and there are several tools you can use to do that. Websites, such as SproutSocial for example, offer users a comparison of both web analytics and social signals to help determine how you’re doing in your social campaign. The information you gather will help you to establish your goals more clearly and identify areas where you need to improve.


4. Offer Social Sign In


When consumers visit your website, give them a minute to get grounded in your content, and then offer a pop-up that asks if they would like to sign into any social media platforms while they’re there. Though many will say no, many others will say yes, and they’re the ones who are more likely to spend both time and money on your site, according to research from Search Engine Land.


Just be sure that the sign in will keep information private. If consumers’ social media accounts are hacked because of an unsecure site, you’ll be under fire.


Staying on top of social media integration is the best habit you can develop for a healthy website. Use some of these tips and watch your web traffic and conversions grow.






from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1DXPU9x via mobile responsive web design

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1NAGC7Z

No comments:

Post a Comment