Social media is kind of a big deal. As of 2019, there are more than 3.2 billion social media users worldwide and 2.2 billion Facebook users. An average of 116 minutes per day is spent on social media, and this can be one way to get more interest in your business and its products and services.
About 90% of companies use social media for brand awareness, and those that engage in social selling find that they are getting a 119% better ROI.
But, this assumes that you are using social media effectively.
The idea is to leverage social media to get more exposure for your business so that you can drive higher conversions. Other reasons for connecting with social media are to build a community, engage with your current clients, and increase brand awareness.
This all begins by connecting social media to your business website so visitors can share and “like” useful content and so that it appears on social sites in an appealing way.
If you haven’t connected social media to your business website yet, or have done so poorly, here are seven tips that can help you fully integrate your site with the major social networks.
1. Make Your Content Easy to Share
The first thing you should do after creating your website is to make the content as easy as possible to share. You can do this by integrating social media buttons throughout your site.
According to best practices, you should have some buttons that are prominent on the main website page that invite users to “follow” you on a few (not all) major social media channels.
Depending on your audience demographics, these might include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Only link to the platforms that you actively manage and monitor, otherwise visitors will waste their time and be disillusioned with a click.
There should also be social sharing buttons on individual content pages. This allows visitors to “share” content on social media sites, which will give you the additional exposure you want.
This might seem like a tall order, but connecting your business website to social media in this way is quite simple through the use of social media plugins.
There are paid and free options that can make this integration seamless.
- AddThis is a free website tool to place social sharing buttons on your site. It is used by 15 million sites, includes share buttons, follow buttons, and analytics.
- ShareThis is another free tool that adds social buttons to WordPress sites. It is simple to install and use and is also used by millions of sites.
- Jetpack by WordPress.com is a popular free WordPress plugin that contains several different items for such things as optimization, backup, security, and stats. It also has a social sharing feature.
- Social Warfare is a social media sharing plugin that has both free and paid options.
2. Social-Enabled Logins
Another way to connect social media to your site is to enable social logins.
This means that a person would use their Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ login to access your site. (One way to accomplish this is with the Nextend Social Login plugin.) If you ask users to register, this speeds up the process considerably.
There is another benefit as well. It also allows you as a business owner to gather data about those users such as their gender, location and a verified email address.
Most people are continuously logged in to their social media accounts, so this increases the odds that you will have users register for your site, interact, and even make purchases.
3. Use a Commenting System
An active comments section is another way to fully engage visitors and get more social media shares. While WordPress has a native system, you can enhance this with a plugin.
- Disqus Comment System is the most widely-used commenting system in the world. It is not only used by WordPress but also Tumblr, Blogger, Squarespace, and a host of other platforms. It is aesthetically pleasing and has a ton of features.
- WP Facebook Comments is a plugin that allows you to have site visitors use their Facebook account to comment on a WordPress post. Since most people are logged into this account, it makes commenting simple, and it also cuts down on spam.
4. Understand the Rules
When integrating social media with your website, you’ll need to follow a few simple rules.
For example, you shouldn’t use your personal Facebook page to operate a business or brand. Instead, you’ll need to set up a business page. There are also some rules you’ll need to follow when running a promotion on Facebook.
If you use Google+, you can’t link to this platform on a page that has contest entries. Also, if you’ve broken a rule or have been put in “time out” by a social media site, you’ll want to remove those links from your site for the time being.
5. Integrate Meta Data
Few business website owners understand how metadata (data about data) is vital to connecting their website to social media. This backend data, which you can generally enter through a SEO plugin, will determine how your website is depicted on a social media platform when a page is “shared.”
Facebook works on the Open Graph (OG) Protocol, and users have the ability to adjust the appearance of a URL regardless of what data is pulled.
However, Facebook is also now asking that users verify their domain to combat fake news and content.
When you adjust the metadata on your site, you can drop a page onto a Facebook post to see how it will look. Twitter also has a card validator to test your website links.
6. Use Social Media Management Tools
If you’re using more than one social media platform for your business website (most are), it makes sense to manage everything from one central location.
There are a variety of social media management tools that can make integrating social media with your website more intuitive.
This is because they provide you will analytics as well as some bells and whistles to make social media management seamless and even fun.
- Sprout Social is one of the most popular social media management tools with scheduling and analytics features.
- Hootsuite has a variety of plans to help business owners manage multiple social media platforms.
- HubSpot not only helps you manage social media but the content and sales funnels as well.
- TweetDeck has been around for years is one of the best free solutions for managing Twitter.
7. Stay Knowledgeable
The social media landscape changes constantly, as does the terminology.
Not only do you need to continue to update your business website with useful and interesting content, but you also must understand how and changes to social media will impact your business and your relationship with your visitors.
Referring to “The Twitter” is more likely to get you an eye roll instead of the “Tweet” that you want out of your content. Make an effort to stay with the times and make tactful choices with your social media marketing.
Since a large percentage of your audience is using social media, it makes sense to take some time and connect the hard work on your website with these platforms.
When you connect your website with social media, those various channels will begin to work seamlessly to promote your online brand.
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