Social Media Marketing is an integral part of any inbound marketing strategy. Just ask any of the 92% of marketers who admit that social media is important to their businesses. Considering its reach, this is hardly surprising. The chance to reach over 2.5 billion people (the one third of the world's population who admit to using social media) is an unmissable opportunity.
But while many marketers incorporate social media into their marketing initiatives, they often miss the opportunity to integrate in one key area. Which is a shame, as this area has the potential to drastically boost a business's social presence and visibility. Wondering where they're missing the mark? Quite simply, they fail to ensure a solid integration between social media and their website.
We're big fans of HubSpot, and we've seen firsthand evidence of the benefits of hosting a website on their platform. After all, it's where we host ours! That said, we're going to take you through the steps to ensuring your HubSpot website and your social media is fully integrated.
6 Key Areas of Social Media Integration
1. Social Share and Follow Buttons
Social share buttons allow visitors to your website to easily share your content with their friends and followers on social media. By including these buttons on your website, you expand the reach of your content by increasing the visibility of your social media accounts where you're sharing all your content. This is a pretty big deal, which is why you should always include social share buttons to every piece of content you create, whether it's your landing pages, emails or blog articles.
Social follow buttons are an important integration to include, as they help promote your brand's presence across your social channels, and can help you to generate fans/followers for these accounts. By including these buttons on your webpages you're increasing visibility for your social media accounts.
While you can include these buttons anywhere on your website, best practices dictates that you should at the very least include them on your "About Us" page, and also on your blog's homepage or sidebar. Here's an example of social share and follow buttons that work well. VoxGen, an IVR (systems and solutions) provider, included social share buttons that float on their blog pages.
As a reader scrolls down on a blog post, the social media share buttons float down along with their scrolling. This means readers can always find the buttons if they want to share content. When viewed on a mobile device, their social share buttons appear on an easy to spot banner at the bottom of the screen, so users can share content via mobile just as easily as via desktop. You can see just how in the image below.
Remember that developing a great user experience is at the heart of designing your social share and follow buttons, so don't be afraid to make adaptations and think outside the box. Another important element to remember is to ensure your social buttons are formatted to share the specific blog post or content the user is viewing. Make sure that the social window includes a small summary and URL of the content in question, and not just a blank window.
2. Social Proof
One of the benefits of social media is that you can use it as a valuable trust-building tool. Social proof integration means including a social widget on your website. This displays the number of likes your webpage or content might have, and allows users to "like" your content as well. The display of likes tells other visitors what people think of your content or brand, and encourages them to engage as well. You can also include a share counter, which highlights how often your content has been shared. The social proof you display adds credibility to your brand as a result of popular opinion.
Social videos are those created and shared on social networks. They provide an easy social media integration, and can present a valuable opportunity to boost your website. Video is a hugely popular media format, and it's important to capitalise on it's popularity by including it on your website.
Have a look at our SEO webinar we hosted through Facebook Live as an example of social video.
3. Social Login
If your website requires a login, you should consider integrating social login for your users. Users often prefer logging in to a website with their social details, as this saves them time in the registration process and allows them to skip the step of creating a new account and providing an email address. By offering social logins, you can boost conversions for user registrations, because you've simplified the process.
Calm, a mindfulness and meditation application for both Android and iOS that I often use has a simple example of social login on their website.
If a user clicks to log in to their account on the website, they have the following options displayed.
Users have the option of logging in with their email addresses and passwords, or by using their Facebook login details. Not only do social logins save users from having to create new accounts everywhere, but they also make it easier to remember one password and login, as opposed to many across different websites.
4. Instagram Photos
If your Instagram account is looking sad and you want to increase your following, consider showcasing your images on your website. By embedding them in your content, you can capture new followers from among your website visitors. Embedding is a simple procedure of clicking on the "3 dots" alongside the right hand of your comment bar. This helps you retrieve the embed code for your Instagram post and easily integrate it on your website.
5. Embedded Social Feeds
Social media is supposed to be exactly that – social! If you have a particularly engaging Twitter feed, embedding it in your website can be a great way to engage visitors to get involved in the conversation. Like embedding your Instagram photos above, embedding your social feeds is a matter of selecting the "3 dots" option, getting your embed code, then sticking it on your site. Simple!
Sprout Social have a simple example of what that looks like:
I hope this has helped you integrate your various social media and website. There's incredible value in integrating social media with your website, and the potential impact your business can experience as a result is well worth the effort of taking the time to make sure you've ticked all the right boxes. Apart from the above, there are also a host of tips, tricks and lots of useful advice in our guide below, so download it if you're ready to get started with some excellent content marketing strategy. If you have any questions, or just want to chat, please get in touch by sending us a message via our live chat in the right-hand corner of your screen, or drop us a comment in the section below.
