Why You Should Integrate Social Media Into Your Business Website

Even though your website might account for the majority of your company's sales, you cannot underestimate the importance of social media to e-commerce. Studies have shown that brands that have a smart social media strategy are six times more likely to exceed their sales quotas and that social networks can influence as many as 74 percent of consumers' buying decisions.It's clear that your brand needs to have a strong social media presence in order to be successful in this day and age, but that doesn't mean that you should abandon your brand's homepage. What it does mean is that you should be integrating social media into your brand's website. Fortunately, there are some very easy ways to do exactly that, and we're going to go through some of them today.

Social Share Buttons

Perhaps the easiest way to integrate social media into your website is through social share buttons. These tiny buttons will allow visitors to your site to share your content on the social network of their choice. This can mean anything from sharing your latest blog post on other people's Facebook walls where it can be seen by their followers to allowing users to share images that they find on your website onto Instagram or Pinterest. This increases awareness of your brand and improves user experience. Social share buttons are tiny and unobtrusive, making them easy to display on your site without affecting the appearance of your homepage. Of course, they also make it very easy for anybody to share your content, even if they're relative novices when it comes to social media.

Social Login

There was a time where, if you wanted to create an account on a website, your only option was to provide your email address. While that still remains an option, users are far more likely to sign up to something on a website if they can log in through Facebook or another social media platform. Email addresses are still relatively private, and providing one's email can feel somewhat intrusive to some people. On the other hand, they will be far more likely to link a social media account to a website that piques their interest. After all, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are designed for sharing and socialization.As a marketer, you can take advantage of this by providing social login buttons. Not only will this help you gain new subscribers and better conversion rates, but it will allow you to collect more social data that can be used in more personalized marketing campaigns.

Social Videos

Social videos are intended to be shared via social media, and they have become a major component of marketing campaigns everywhere. By adding a few of these videos to your own website, you can encourage others to share them and increase awareness of your brand. Of course, you need to know how to create a video that people will deem worthy of being shared on social media, which can be a challenge in itself. It may take some time to come up with a video that goes viral for your brand, but anything you post should be kept under a minute and get to the point you want to make quickly.

Sharing Your Instagram Photos

If you have an Instagram account - and you should have one, especially if there is a strong visual component to your brand - you can share photos from your account right on your website. Not only will the right photos look great on your homepage, but anybody who sees them will notice where they came from and be encouraged to visit and follow your Instagram account.To include Instagram photos on your website, simply click the series of small grey dots underneath an image on your account. You should be able to find the embed code there. Just copy it and paste it onto your homepage to embed the image. Not only do you now have a great visual component to your site, but you will have properly linked it to your Instagram account for some greater marketing opportunities.

Social Proof

Naturally, one of the best ways to encourage someone to create an account on your website or share your content is to prove that you are trustworthy enough to do so. For that you will need to integrate social proof. Social proof refers to people's reliance on the feedback that a brand or website receives on social media to determine whether it is worth their time and attention. For example, a high number of Facebook "likes" could show random users that a brand is popular and has been around long enough to gain a good reputation on social media.To take advantage of your own brand's social proof, you first need to integrate the proper social media widgets. These allow users to react to your content on social media, but they also allow users to see how many others have liked and shared your content. Since as many as 79 percent of consumers now trust social proof as much as personal recommendations, you cannot afford not to take advantage of it for your own brand.

Hashtags

Finally, you cannot forget the old standby of placing a hashtag before trendy topics. By now, you're probably aware that placing a hashtag in front of every other word in a tweet or Facebook update is annoying and off-putting, but a well-placed hashtag in front of a short word or phrase can make your content all that much easier to find and share. Just remember to curate your hashtag to make sure it doesn't go to an irrelevant image or something that could get flagged as spam.As you can see, integrating social media into a business website is very easy. All of these techniques can be implemented with little effort on your part without compromising the look of your homepage, but they can quickly translate into more conversions and greater sales. As always, don't hesitate to look at other brands to see how they are making the most out of social media, and don't be afraid to experiment with different strategies to find what works best for your brand.