Boost Your Site Engagement with Social

The Digital Essentials, Part 3

Developing a robust digital strategy is both a challenge and an opportunity. Part 3 of the Digital Essentials guide series explores five of the essential technology-driven experiences customers expect, which you may be missing or not fully utilizing.

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There are more than 3 billion internet users – and 2 billion of them are active on social media. With that in mind, social media marketing needs to be an important part of your overall digital marketing strategy. And as social media constantly evolves – with updates like the recent Facebook algorithm change that gives preference to posts from family and friends over brands – it’s becoming more and more important to find a way for you to engage with followers wherever possible. Both on the various social channels and integrated within your own website.
Whether it’s taking your content and opening it up to a larger audience or using social to make the on-site experience more seamless for visitors, integrating with existing social channels can benefit user experience and increase overall engagement with your site.
Here are four ways to make it happen.
Social Share Buttons
Including social share buttons on your site is different from just including links out to your social media pages. These buttons allow your visitors to share your website content, which in turn helps you gain exposure, increase search rankings through SEO, and ultimately bridge the divide between your website and social channels. Make the buttons easy to find, including them at the bottom, top, or side of your page. And focus on featuring the social channels you are actively involved in, instead of trying to tackle every channel right away.
Social Logins
Social login is a form of single sign on where visitors can use their existing login credentials from a third-party social site like Facebook to log in to your site. This simplifies the registration process and provides an enhanced user experience. In fact, 73 percent of internet users prefer to log in to a site using a social login over email registration. Beyond the user experience, it also helps you by collecting user data points to help in personalizing future campaigns and targeting your audience.
Social Videos and Photo Content
Integrating social videos and photos is a great way to enable your most popular site content to be shared with a wider audience. And it allows the people who are visiting your site to become your brand advocates, sharing your content easily across their social channels. Videos are always the most shareable content within social. Especially if you have an engaging “About Our Brand” video, or any content that’s a “How-To” or “DIY.” That kind of content plays well on social and gets shared easily.
Social Reviews
Including social reviews brings third-party authenticity to your site. Around 79 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, so this can be a huge factor for consumers when they are evaluating your site, content, or products. To facilitate social reviews, you can implement social widgets on your website, such as the Facebook “Like” box, to identify yourself as a credible brand and increase exposure.