Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, and it’s only getting more integrated into a wider ecosystem. According to The Global State of Digital 2022 report, only last year has seen a 10.1% increase in social media users, making a total of 4.62 billion. 

The number of social media platforms for marketing and promotion is growing, with TikTok being the most recent addition. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Youtube are the most used ones. In this post, I want to share with you how to make the most out of social media by integrating them into your website and how to make them work together for your benefit.

First, let’s understand what is website social media integration?  

Website social media integration is the act of using social media accounts as an extension of your website marketing strategy and improving your user experience by exploiting the features developed by social media providers. This allows you to redirect your social media audience to your website and vice versa.

Social media integration is one of the key factors for your online marketing efforts. It helps you accomplish a few key goals:

• Increase your brand reach and awareness –  social media integration helps you to increase traffic to your website through social media, on the other hand, it provides a wider reach of your social media activity by encouraging website visitors to join your social following. 
• Increase engagement – social media integration with your website adds call-to-actions and makes it more engaging 
• Grow conversions –  you can ease your website user flow by some features offered by social media providers that can make your prospective customers’ journey more smooth and eventually help them do your desired actions. 
• Built trust –  bringing visibility to your social media activities and mentions help visitors to create higher levels of trust.

The number of social media platforms for marketing and promotion is growing, with TikTok being the most recent addition. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Youtube are the most used ones.

Let’s get into more details on best practices of social media integration

Social login

Social login is a single sign-on for end users which uses the existing login information from a social network provider. Due to social login users can sign in to your website with social media authentication and avoid filling in all the required information for creating a new account.

Users usually abandon websites on the account creation step. The main 2 reasons are that they avoid filling out registrations form and are having trouble creating and remembering another username and password. According to the 2019 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report, respondents spend an average of 10.9 hours per year setting and/or resetting passwords. Social media logins are game savers here. When already logged in to the social media account users can experience a one-click sign-in to your website which ensures a smooth user journey, thus, a better conversion rate.

Social media login comes with other benefits as well. When logging in via social media account email of the user is verified by the social network provider. Furthermore, you can get additional information about users, such as interests, birthdays, location, etc. This will allow you to provide personalized content for your users. And finally, people usually keep their social media profiles up to date unlike their accounts on most of the other websites and applications.

With all of its benefits, social logins are also a subject of discussions for security and privacy. Take some additional efforts to ensure that your social login experiences are secure and communicate it to your customers.

You can see the example ASOS e-commerce website social login with awesome communication to customers explaining the “why” and assuring privacy.  

Useful tools for social login integration:

• LoginRadius
• OneAll

Social sharing 

Social sharing buttons on your website pages not only give your readers a seamless way to share your content but also allows you to increase engagement on your social media and website. This also increases the likelihood of sharing your web content on other websites, therefore, affecting your SEO efforts. 

Although social sharing buttons are critical be careful to not spam your webpage by overuse of them. Keep the focus on sharable content and only for platforms that are relevant to your brand. 

Word Stream chooses one of the most popular positionings – the floating social buttons on the left side of the content. Furthermore, the number of shares is displayed on top of the buttons that encourage users to share. Find more about social media sharing buttons on their blog post. 

Here is another example where we can see multiple social sharing buttons and other call to actions on one screen, which can overwhelm customers. 

Useful tools for social sharing:  

• Share This
• Social Snap
• Easy Social Share

Social Media Feed

This integration helps to display your brand’s content from social media platforms on your website and keep it up to date. 

There are many tools that allow you to choose which social media posts you want to share, customize your layout, and choose the type of content (mentioned posts, page posts, videos, etc.) you want to be displayed. 

A successful example of social media feed integration is Life Is Good clothing brand which displays on the home page of its website their customers’ posts from Instagram using #ThisIsOptimism hashtag. Not only does this keep the webpage more interesting and always updated, improving brand image and customer connection, but also the brand links the products used in the photos to their shopping pages, which boots sales.  

Useful tools for social media feed display :

• Taggbox Widget
• Embed social 
• Walls.io

Social Media Reviews

Reviews build trust and credibility for your business and help your prospective customers with buying decisions. However, customers do not always leave reviews on the webpage but on the social media platforms of their preference, and people who come to your website are not necessarily aware of those. There are many tools that can help you not only display and keep up to date on those reviews but also add new ones through social media authentication.

Useful tools for social media review display:

• Birdeye
• eKamria

Social Shops

According to Instagram research 70% of shopping enthusiasts, people turn to Instagram for product discovery.  Another loved social media platform for product discoveries is Pinterest. According to Pinterest weekly Pinners are 7x more likely to say that Pinterest is the most influential platform in their purchase journey, compared to social media platforms.

Thus, if you have an e-commerce webpage go ahead and upload your product catalog on social media and link them to your website. Here are examples from Camp Brand Goods on Instagram and Hoff on Pinterest.

These social media integration tips can take your marketing efforts to the next level. Start your journey right away!

Author: Anna Simonyan