The key to standing out and succeeding over your competitors is by increasing your online presence. Most businesses take advantage of social media because it has become one of the useful and most powerful tools to let people know about your company, products and services.
A website that is prominently visible on search engines makes it easier to connect with potential consumers, thereby leading to a positive impact towards the business. What causes websites to rank higher than the rest depends on search engine optimization (SEO), although its main driving force is high quality content.
On top of these, you need to connect your website to social channels. In this article, we will share with you some tips and techniques to maximize social media for your website.
The Importance of Social Media
Social media has become a part of any online business. At least 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media. With the help of social media, it has helped businesses in a number of ways, namely:
- Increase brand awareness. Companies that are visible on social media are exposed to more people.
- Improve brand loyalty. Customers who are engaged by companies through social media have a higher probability of becoming more loyal to the brand.
- Convert a casual site visitor to a paying customer
- Increase conversion rates. Through social media, consumers are able to get closer to the business. Moreover, leaving a comment on a post or sending a private message allows them to create a connection with the business. This causes a consumer to feel valued, which then becomes a launchpad to make them loyal customers, provided that consumers are treated properly.
- Increase inbound traffic. Social media accounts provide information about your company’s website, thereby allowing the audience to be redirected to the website should they need to find more information.
- Bring down marketing costs. Since creating social media accounts is practically free, it becomes a channel of providing information about the products and services of a company without having to worry about paying someone to publish each post.
- Accept feedback. Social media allows a business an opportunity to gain information that can be beneficial for the company by letting the consumers express their experiences or provide any suggestions, which can be useful for the improvement of the company.
How To Connect Your Website to Social Media
These days, more companies and businesses utilize social media to connect to as many people as possible. Picture this: every time customers like your content or leave a comment on your post, all of their friends will be able to see this activity on their news feeds. That one like or comment can already do wonders to your company’s online exposure.
To optimize your website presence through social media, here are several techniques that can be helpful:
1. Embed video
More than just wanting to look at a still picture, making use of videos can stir up interest among your audience. Videos provide more information, which allows the audience to understand your products or services more.
It becomes more effective when you use videos to provide tutorials that the audience can watch anytime they want, no matter how many times they want. Create videos that are share-worthy – something that would instantly drive your audience to share the content with their friends.
2. Leveraging Social Proofs
Ever since social networking sites came into existence, it has somehow become any consumer’s guide before buying any product. It’s one way for people to check whether the item is worth their money.
One social media feature that potential consumers look for are product reviews. Being able to check on ratings or reviews left by other previous customers is extremely helpful. This is the reason why a lot of social influencers offer their services to write about a company’s products, to let consumers know their experience.
3. Social Logins via Business Website
User engagement is a surefire way to grow consumer loyalty, and this is usually achieved through community boards, forums, chat rooms, ad comment boxes. Another rising trend in welcoming feedback and encouraging online discussions is through the use of social login.
Social login is an amazing feature for any website. It optimizes user experience since site visitors do not need to create a new account in order to log in to your website. Instead, all they need to do is to log into their social media account, so that they can instantly engage with current conversations and interact with other online users.
4. Integrate photos on your website design
Images and full-sized photos have become a go-to design trend for websites these days, and the same is true with social media. For example, a restaurant website may post a photo of its best-selling dish on Instagram. This kind of photo should be taken with proper lighting and positioned in a way that makes any visitor drool over the dish.
A good way to connect your site to social media is by adding a featured image or an Open Graph image to your webpages. This way, when you share your site link on social media, the photo gets displayed as well.
Source out pictures that can easily catch the attention of the audience, skipping selfies and instead focusing more on what the business offers.
5. Using the Share Button for Social Media Sites
This is a simple but absolutely effective way on how you can spread the word about your online existence. Provide compelling content on your website that can instantly trigger visitors to share it through their social media accounts. Then, add social media share buttons on your pages, to make it easier for visitors to share your content.
You will be surprised at how much traffic it would bring to your website.
Final Word
Business owners in the past may not be as successful as today’s generation of entrepreneurs in terms of promoting their brands. What’s great is that as web technology improved over the years, more online businesses have better shots at success. As long as they are always aware of the latest trends in social media and web development, success isn’t too impossible to achieve.