Integrating Social Media On Your Website: How To Do It

Social media marketing is an area of marketing that is getting a huge amount of attention at the moment, and it’s easy to see why. It essentially allows businesses to keep in touch with their customers/clients without having to pay a penny but the thing is, you need to build up a good following in order to make social media marketing worthwhile.

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This is the part that a lot of businesses struggle with and one of the common misconceptions is that social media marketing is an entirely independent form of marketing. This is not the case at all and instead, it needs to be used to compliment your existing online marketing tactics (namely your website).

But how exactly can you integrate social media marketing with your website? I mean, they’re completely different things aren’t they? Not entirely. In fact, social media marketing is getting more and more prominent in the online marketing space and recently has even been taken into account by Google when deciphering which websites to rank highest in their search engine results.

Here are a few simple ways that you can marry your website and social media marketing tactics together to get the best of both worlds.

#1. Embed A Facebook “Like” Box On Your Website

WordPress Social Media Tips


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For a lot of businesses, the main goal of their social media pages (e.g. Facebook page) is to attract attention to their website. A lot of businesses post out blog posts on these pages with the aim of enticing their audience into clicking the links and visiting their website. However, you should also be aiming to convert existing website visitors into fans of your Facebook, Twitter and other social media profiles too.
For most businesses, Facebook is perhaps the most utilised social media marketing channel and luckily, it’s extremely easy to integrate your Facebook business page with your website. The way you do this is by embedding a Facebook “Like” box on your website.

You can see what one of these boxes looks like in the image above. This was taken from a UK printing companies website but if you look around most websites you visit, it’s likely you’ll see an almost identical “Like” box embedded somewhere on the site.

WordPress Social Media Tips


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Facebook actually supplies this code free of charge (as you can see above) and creating one for your own business page is a simple process that will literally take 2 – 3 minutes, maximum. Once you have your code, it’s as simple as copying and pasting it into the required area of your website.

The effect that this has on your website is huge as it basically allows your website visitors to “Like” your Facebook page with just the click of a button. They don’t even have to leave your website.

Once they like your page, the benefits are obvious as you can then keep them updated with news, offers and whatnot and keep them interested in your business.

#2. Add Social Sharing Buttons To Your Site/Blog

WordPress Social Media Tips


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Another way you can easily marry your site with social media marketing is to include social sharing buttons on your website. A lot of businesses are investing quite heavily in content marketing these days (e.g. blog posts, infographics etc) and if this is the case, social share buttons make perfect sense as they allow your visitors to share your content to a social media website of their choice with just the click of a button.

This will in turn generate more traffic to your website who may also share your content. This can often create a slightly viral effect and also, improve search engine rankings slightly.

A lot of websites utilise social share buttons on their websites including many big and small names. The image that you see above was taken from the extremely well-known business publication website; Forbes. You can see that at the end of their blog posts, there are a number of social share buttons that allow the visitor to share their content to Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and many other sites with just one click. This can be very powerful for website traffic and a lot of websites actually generate a good percentage of their regular traffic for social media sites.

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But the question remains, how exactly do you add these social share buttons to your site? Well, you can do it manually as just about every social network supplies their own personal share button code free of charge; you just have to copy and paste it into your websites code.

However, the most simple way is to use a sharebar plug-in (such as the one pictured above for WordPress). These are simple to install and include share buttons for all of the most popular social networks.
There are also a lot of different share bars available, so you can choose the one that looks the most visually appealing to you. They’re available for WordPress, Joomla and even static HTML websites too.

Conclusion

Clearly, there are a lot of different ways to integrate social media into your website and hopefully, you can see the power that this can bring. It should also be noted that along with adding a Facebook “Like” box to your website, you can also grab the code from Twitter to add a “Follow” button/box which is great if you want to place more emphasis on Twitter than Facebook.

The thing to remember is that social media integration should always improve the user experience rather than disrupt it. You see a lot of sites that are quite forceful in their social media integration (utilising pop-ups and other intruding methods to convince “Like’s” and “Shares”) but in my opinion, this is a poor idea even if it increases social media exposure as it makes your site annoying and distracts users from your content.

It’s worth keeping this in mind when exploring the various methods of social media integration and plug-ins that are available.

- Written by Joshua -

He is a lover of social media (particularly Facebook and Twitter) and currently works for the UK printing company, Discount Banner Printing to increase social media engagement.

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