Be more social: integrate your website with Social Media

If you are not a brand like Coca Cola or Nike (I am sorry, I used those names in my previous post concerning Chinese Social Media) maybe you have a lot of work to do to engage your community and fans in Facebook, Twitter and so on. But, don’t worry: actually, social channels and your website should work seamlessly to promote your brand.

But you maybe forgot to connect your social media with your own web. It’s usual,  when I started to dig into this marvel world I had no idea how to connect my own sites with my social profiles. Nowadays, despite the fact that I am not a ‘guru’ on this matters (I prefer not to consider myself as a guru…ever! because if one day I think about myself “wow, look at that man, he really knows the key”, that day I will be lose eagerness for learning… and all this stuff is about being updated all the time… I prefer to remain humble rather than proclaim myself to be the best…)

So, in this article I’ll dive into an small “how-to” guide to ensure your website and your media platforms are working together to track one target: engage your fans and make your brand more visible. Come on! You don’t have to be one of the big players to make a good usage of these simple tips!

1. Include Visible Social Media Buttons

Facebook, Twitter and the most of the Social Media Networks provide featured widgets to add in any part of your website. It’s not so difficult to do and, if you don’t know how to codify them within your site, it’s not expensive to hire a developer to make a little changes. If you are using WordPress to run your site, even better: there are lot of plugins to connect your Social Media with your site.

Facebook has many tools to integrate your website with its open graph protocol, like the “like button”, “live streaming”, among others.

But you don’t have to feel obligated to link your website to all your social network you have. Some of them will serve to show pictures or displays videos (you know what I am talking about: flickr and youtube), but maybe you are more interested in engaging people from Facebook, Twitter and, recently, Google+. So, you have to cautiously choose the social platforms you consider will give your brand more visibility.

Last but no least, if you want your users to be updated on your news and posts from Twitter and Facebook, use those widgets that will show your Social Networks  feeds into your website. I highly recommend Facebook Like Box and Twitter Profile Widget. They can be displayed in a sidebar (I prefer to do so…)

2. Include Share Buttons

If you want people to share your contents, you need to make them easily shareable. Even more if you are selling products or you have a blog. Share Buttons should enable website-goers to seamlessly share or recommend your website, your brand, or your product. The famous “Like” button is available for Websites and it’s just not a Facebook privilege. On the contrary, Mark (Zuckerberg, FB founder I mean) wants to connect with all websites worldwide. Twitter and Google+ want the same.

A hint: if you have relevant content (I mean, resources, articles, blog, posts, etc.) you should attempt to make it as simple as possible for visitors to share it with their social community.

3. Use Analytics

Monitoring is ever the best way to find out how big your success is on growing and engaging your online community. Pay attention how individuals are using your social media buttons by tapping into Google Analytics. It means how many people are clicking on your sharing buttons.

It’s easy. You should set up Event Tracking in Google Analytics. If this words sounds unfamiliar for you, don’t worry! there is an easy understandable step-by-step-guide provided by Google.

4. Don’t Overload Your Page With Share Buttons

I bet that you want to assure your compelling information is shareable in an easy way, but putting share buttons all over the screen of your user is not the best method to engage and compromise them to spread your content into Social Media. In fact, this kind of web design often bothers your customers because they realize it’s obvious you want to share your information in any way instead of writing carefully and accurately and strong, relevant an shareable information that deserves to be spread into Social Media.

5. Go beyond Google Analytics

Each Social Community has its own monitoring source: Facebook Insights, Twitter Counter, Linkedin Stats, etc. If it’s worth to trust Google Analytics because it is the most powerful online search engine based in keywords, each social media has its own monitoring resources. It’s convenient to have a look at them as many times as you check out your google analytics as well.