Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Youtube should work together with your website to promote your online brand.
Are you leveraging the power of social media on your site? If you’re like most businesses, you’re probably missing out on potential interactions, impressions and ultimately sales. Courtesy of our friends at the Social Media Examiner, below is a quick how-to guide to ensure your business website and social media platforms are working together to maximize your online exposure.
1: Include Visible Social Media Buttons
It's a no-brainer but double-check how many of your competitors aren't doing it. Best practice is for social media buttons to at the top, bottom or along the side of your home page. Links or buttons should remain in your navigation as users move from page to page. To ensure that users don’t exit your web page altogether, you can create buttons or links that open your social media pages in a new window.
2: Only Integrate to Where You're Active
Don't get trapped into linking to all social media channels you’ve dabbled in. If you’re fonder of Twitter and have completely abandoned your Facebook page, there’s no reason to link to any outlet that is not being actively managed. In fact, linking out to inactive channels can ultimately cause more harm than good.
If you use social media to keep your customers up to date with your current products and offerings and are actively managing your outlets on a daily or bi-weekly basis, it might be worth showcasing your Twitter feed or Facebook posts directly on your website.
3: Include Up-to-Date Buttons
Social media changes fast. So if you added your buttons a year ago, they are probably "walking with the dinosaurs" today. Facebook fans morphed into Likes, group pages died, +1 is spanking new and LinkedIn improved significantly. Do research to find the most current social media terminology so you don’t get caught mumbling about “The Facebook” and “The Twitter.”
4: Include Share Buttons
If you sell a product or run an eCommerce site and haven’t added share buttons to your product pages, you're missing out on a whole host of potential impressions. Share buttons should enable visitors to your website to seamlessly share or recommend a product. Similar to eCommerce sites, if you have resources, articles, a blog or other valuable content on your site, you should attempt to make it as simple as possible for readers to share it with others.
Check out AddThis or ShareThis for a solution here. Both provide efficient and easy-to-use solutions for social media sharing across eCommerce sites with the added benefit of analytics to see how the content is getting shared.
5: Use the Power of Analytics
Pay attention to the number of clicks on your outbound social media links by tapping into Google Analytics. An easy way to explore this is by setting up Event Tracking. Google provides a step-by-step guide on how to incorporate the correct codes into your site. If you find that few individuals explore your social media outlets once landing on your page, perhaps your social media buttons aren’t in a convenient location.
Many types of software allow you to see your social media insights alongside your web analytics in order to pick up on trends and to better understand the successes or failures of campaigns. SproutSocial allows users to compare web analytics and social media reporting information from specific timeframes side by side. Being able to see the way in which your social media and website analytics relate proves useful in establishing goals, measuring successes and identifying areas in which you can improve.
6: Pay Attention to Terms and Conditions
Even some major brands continue using social media in ways that violate the platforms’ terms and conditions. You can't use Google+ for contest entries, a personal Facebook page shouldn’t be used to operate a brand and there are certain rules to adhere to when running a promotion on Facebook. The way you use social media reflects on your website, as well as your brand as a whole. If you’ve accidentally violated some terms and conditions in the past, delete those pages and do not link out to them even in the interim.
7: Stay Knowledgeable and Don’t Over-Do It
With the changing social media landscape these days, it is easy to confuse social media features. Keep in mind:
You won’t be directing individuals to your Facebook page by installing a Facebook “Like” button on a specific website page. Instead, you are allowing individuals to “Like”/share the information, content or product that is found on that specific page. There is no correlation between Liking a specific website page and directing users to “Like” your branded Facebook page.
You want to make sure that compelling information is easily shareable, but littering social media share buttons all over your webpage isn’t the way to go. Before adding share buttons to a page, ask yourself, “Is there information here that people would find worth sharing?”
