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Everything You Need to Know About Website Social Media Integration

Sep 11, 2023 | computer design programs, News

All your marketing channels should work together to build brand awareness and reach, generate engagement, and encourage purchases. The importance of social media cannot be overstated. Website social media integration is a crucial strategy that allows your social media presence and website to complement each other, driving traffic both ways. By integrating your social media with your website, you create a cycle of engagement where your audience clicks a link on your social media to visit your website and then clicks an icon on your website to return to your social media. Positive, user-friendly engagement with your brand only increases your chance of higher sales and success.

What Does It Mean to Integrate Social Media With Your Website?

Website social media integration is the process of connecting your social media accounts with your website to improve engagement, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic. Integration allows your social media audience to access your website easily and enables your social media accounts to be easily accessed on your website.

These benefits increase your brand reach and brand awareness. They encourage engagement with your website and help build a bigger audience on social media. For example, if you have social media integrated with your website, a site visitor can share your content or your products on social media just by clicking a social media button for Facebook, Instagram, etc., instead of copying and pasting the URL to the webpage.

Benefits of Website Social Media Integration

It Makes Your Website More Interactive

Integrating social media with your website can enhance the experience of your website visitors and keep them engaged with it for a longer period. They have more ways to interact with you as a brand, by clicking your social media links and following you, or by sharing the content they find on their social media. This creates a more interesting, positive brand experience.

It Encourages Conversation

With social media integration, your prospective customers will have an easier time communicating with you and talking about your brand. They can click a social icon and interact with your profiles and posts by liking, sharing, and commenting. They can also post reviews about your businesses and start a conversation with other prospective customers and members of your audience.

It Expands Your Social Following

Linking your social media profiles directly to your website makes it easy for visitors to find and interact with your social profiles. This means that once users leave your website, they still have a way to interact with you, and you have a way to continue to boost brand awareness.

It Enhances Your User Experience

Integrating social media with your website can help your site visitors have a more positive experience with your brand. Having a direct point of contact and a public social media presence can reassure customers that you’re a trustworthy business. Additionally, allowing users to log into your website with their social media accounts adds a layer of legitimacy and convenience that will only improve your audience’s perception of your brand.

How to Implement Website Social Media Integration

Place Social Share Plugins on Product Pages & Blog Posts

You want customers to be able to easily share your products on social media, and social share plugins are the way to do it. A social share plugin allows you to place social buttons on product pages on your e-commerce website. It’s recommended that you only use a few relevant social share plugins. Facebook, X—formerly known as Twitter—and Instagram, are popular options that receive great user engagement. Similar platforms like Pinterest are well-suited to share product pages as well. LinkedIn, on the other hand, wouldn’t be ideal, as the platform isn’t commonly used for e-commerce purposes.

The social sharing links should be placed close to product images to enable your site visitors to easily see them and quickly share your content.

You also want users to be able to quickly share your blogs, so you should include social sharing links on blog posts as well.

Make It Easy for Visitors to Sign Up With Social Login

Integrating social login with your website allows your site visitors to log into your website through the social media platform that is synced to their computers, tablets, or smartphones. This eliminates the need to create a username and password when signing in or checking out, making both processes more efficient and convenient.

Using social logins also allows you to collect relevant and accurate data about your users—such as email address, age, gender, and interest—and reduce spam.

Embed Social Media Widgets on Your Website

A social media widget can display all of your social media feeds together in one place. Your brand’s social media posts and user-generated content are aggregated and displayed with this tool to create interesting, engaging visual content. You can also extract content that uses a specific hashtag about a relevant topic or product, depending on what you want to highlight.

It’s best practice to use social content that fits in well with the design and style of your website, so you should try to use the same colors, fonts, images, and layouts in your social content as on your website. If you simply use a Facebook or Twitter embed, your social media content may not tie in well with the rest of your site. Plugins like Instagram Feed by Smash Balloon allow you to embed your Instagram feed and style it to match the rest of your website.

One of the most common types of embedded social content is videos from YouTube and Vimeo, which can help add engaging visual content to your website. Videos can be embedded by copying and pasting the embed code from the platform you want to pull your video from.

If your social media profiles are regularly updated, embedding a social media widget will help keep your website content fresh and relevant.

Make Shoppable Social Media Walls

Similar to using social media widgets to display your social media feed, you can use tools like Taggbox to make social media content on your website shoppable. This means you can tag your products in your posts or user-generated content posts, add the ability to purchase them and embed this whole display as a social media gallery on your website. Prospective customers can see your products in action and buy them right from the posts, all while still on your website.

Shoppable social media walls also introduce the concept of social proof, which uses the voice of the customer to sell a product—and it drives sales faster than any other marketing tactic.

Use Feedback Tools

You can use tools like Askem to integrate feedback mechanisms and social posts into your website. Askem allows you to get customer feedback by offering fully customizable reaction buttons and pulling social feedback to your website. Customers can also leave text entries so you can get insightful product feedback.

Use Open Graph and X (Twitter) Cards

When a user posts your website on social media, you want relevant brand images and titles to accompany your website URL. Open graph (OG) tags can automatically generate this content when a user posts a link to your website. Open graph tags are meta information that can be inserted into the <head> section of a webpage.

Most social media platforms can use OG tags, but it’s worth finding out what social platforms are most popular for your users. X, formerly known as Twitter, requires specific tags of its own called X/Twitter Cards.

Insert YouTube Video Testimonials

Convincing video testimonials is a great way to boost product sales on your website. Video testimonials are one of the most effective marketing strategies.

You can easily embed videos with the YouTube Feed Pro plugin and get engaging, persuasive content on your website.

Website Social Media Integration for WordPress

  • Jetpack Plugin’s Publicize Feature: This plugin enables you to auto-post your social media accounts every time you update your blog. You can also use it to display social sharing buttons underneath your posts and pages.
  • WordPress to Buffer Plugin: Buffer is a social media scheduling service, and its WordPress plugin enables you to connect social accounts directly to your WordPress posts and pages. Depending on the plan you choose, you can schedule up to 100 posts at a time, on eight different social accounts.
  • If This, Then That (IFTTT) Service: This service enables you to automate a specific action whenever a particular trigger is met, called a “recipe.” For example, you can set up a recipe that auto-publishes a post to your Facebook page every time your WordPress website has a new blog entry.
  • Pretty Links’ Social Sharing Button: These are icons that display on each of your posts or pages and allow readers to click and share your content to their personal social media accounts.
  • Feed Them Social Plugin: This adds your social media feeds to your website so your latest content is always there.
  • Juicer’s WordPress Plugin: With this plugin, you can link content from over 15 social media channels to one centralized place on your website.

Common Website Social Media Integration Mistakes to Avoid

  • Placing your social media icons at the top of your website so that any traffic is redirected from it
  • Not customizing social media icons to match your website’s brand
  • Linking your website to inactive social media accounts that have no value to prospective customers
  • Linking to social sharing buttons that show low sharing numbers, can negatively affect your credibility
  • Using plugins that have heavy JavaScript files, which extend the loading time of the webpage and can lead to website abandonment issues

How Your Website Social Media Integration Boosts SEO

You should point your social media followers to your website. They’re already interested in your brand, and they can view blog posts and other web pages and potentially make a purchase. Generating traffic to your website through social media also increases the likelihood that your content will be shared elsewhere on the internet, which can potentially improve your search engine optimization (SEO).

Social media allows you to show the human side of your business and create an emotional connection with your audience. You can engage with customer comments and questions and encourage followers to visit your website for more information.

It’s important to grow your audience when you’re using social media to encourage clicks to your website, but you also want to use wording that makes people curious and want to visit your website. When you’re sharing a link to a new blog post or webpage, you should provide a snippet of the content that captures your readers and entices them to click on the link. You should always use a call to action, for example: “Want to learn more? Read this article.”

Once you’ve implemented these strategies, you can see what type of posts on what platforms are best at driving traffic to your website. Posts with photos and videos typically attract greater engagement, and the length of your posts matters, too, so keep an eye on the performance of longer vs. shorter posts.

Become a Social Media Influencer with Website Social Media Integration

If you’re interested in achieving mastery of social media platforms and integrating them with websites to boost audience engagement, you should consider Erie Institute of Technology’s Web Design & Social Media Marketing Program.

With this 15-month training program, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the design and marketing of social media content, including how brand managers integrate social media with business websites and create social campaigns. You’ll be able to manage your online presence on social media and websites and encourage user interaction with your content.

Apply online today, or visit our website to learn more about our computer and design training programs.

ross-aresco-cfo-erie-institute-of-technology-EIT

Ross Aresco

CFO

Ross Aresco is the CFO of Erie Institute of Technology. Erie Institute of Technology (EIT) is an Erie Pennsylvania technical/trade school providing training programs for medical, computer, electronics, manufacturing, and technology careers. EIT offers programs in many different areas to suit your interests and talents.

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