If you are a marketer or are in charge of marketing activities for your company, you already know the importance of social media integration in marketing campaigns. Most companies and individuals leverage the power of social media to increase their product reach as well as gain market access to places they would not reach physically or through mainstream media such as radio, television, and newspaper advert.
While individuals and companies invest most of their efforts on social media, the problem is that most of these companies have individuals or separate accounts for each social media platform, making it difficult for them to generate the much-needed traffic. Some of the commonly used social media platforms are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Google+, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, and WhatsApp among other platforms.
Initially, you needed to separately operate these social media platforms. Imagine opening more than ten tabs on your browser, one for each account, and switching from one account to the other. How about having to remember all the passwords and usernames? This would leave you drained at the end of the day with very little achievement. Thanks to social media integration, you can operate all your social media accounts without going through all these hassles.
What is Social Media Integration?
Social media integration is one of the major ways to maintain an online presence for your brand or product. According to Socialmediatoday.com, over 84% of companies have integrated social media into their traditional marketing campaigns in a bid to generate sales leads and conversions. But what is social media integration?
In simple terms, social media integration is a marketing strategy whereby you, as the marketer, include all your social media channels under one platform using tools such as a social wall. In this case, you can post one post to all the social media accounts in one go and it will reach customers using the various social media platforms. Social media integration is key to developing your online marketing plan as well as visibility and business growth. It not only promotes your channels but also enables your customers to explore and share these channels.
Most customers who visit your website use different social media platforms. Some may prefer Facebook messages while others may find twitter more convenient. Therefore, you must cater to their preferences if you want to generate sales out of them. This is where social media integration comes in handy for you.
How to Integrate Social Media with Your Website?
To promote your online brand, your social media and website need to work seamlessly together. Social media integration gives those who visit your website a faster and simple method of connecting with you on their preferred social media channels. This makes it easier for you and your customers to interact and close deals.
Here are some of the simple ways to integrate social media into your website.
1. Social share and follow button
You may have noticed that most websites you visit have a “share button” or “follow us” somewhere on them. These websites allow you to share their content with others. Well, you can integrate social media on your website by adding a “follow” or “share” button to your pages. You can include these social share buttons on your website header, footer, or along the side of your page. The social share button will provide an opportunity for those who visit your page to share your content easily and also improve user experience. The social follow button will also increase your social media following.
2. Social videos and photos
Social videos are videos that you can create and share on your social networks. These social videos provide easy and simple integration of your social media and website. Creating and sharing videos and videos on social can be an expensive venture for most people. Therefore, it would be a missed opportunity or you if you do not include your social videos to your website too. You can use videos to showcase “how-to” or the method of using your product. You can also use video sliders to attract and entertain visitors to your website so that they can spend more time exploring the site.
Apart from social videos, social photos on your website are another way of attracting more visitors to your website and grow your follower count. For instance, if you want to increase your Instagram following, you can embed your Instagram photos in your blog to capture new followers from your website visitors.
Useful Read: Make Social Media Work For You! (A Small Business Guide)
3. Social login
Have you visited some sites that require you to log in before you can access any information? While some of these websites require that to sign up or register before you can log in, other sites will simply allow you to login using your social media account. According to LoginRadius, 73% of internet users prefer to log in to a site using their social media account as opposed to signing up using their email address. Therefore, if you require users to log in to your website, you can improve their experience by allowing social login.
Social login shortens the registration process and increases conversion and retention. You are also able to gather social data that you can use in your marketing strategy.
4. Social proof
With the increasing online scams, internet users are becoming skeptical about some social media accounts and sites. If you want your visitors to trust you more, you should integrate social proof to your website. Most consumers trust social proof as much as a social recommendation. Integrating proper social widgets on your website increases sales and conversation. One of the ways to achieve this is by using Facebook’s social widget such as the “Like box.” This will show the number of people who like your page as well as increase your Facebook page likes.
5. Social Media Feeds
You can make your website more interactive and engaging by embedding a social media wallfeed on it to display your social media hashtags. Integrating your social media wall on your website enables you to display all your social media feeds in one place. It does this by pulling posts from your social media channels containing the specified hashtag. For instance, you choose hashtag #bodybuilding, all the posts with this hashtag will be pulled from the specified social media channels and displayed on the social media wall on your website.
You can embed a social wall on your website using tools such as Social Stream Designer, Taggbox, FeedWind, SnapWidget, or Miappi. These tools are quite simple to use and offer real-time feed update and sync. You can also use these tools to create an attractive theme and style for your social feeds.
6. Social media comment
Most online visitors like interactive sites where they can leave a comment and rate their experience. You can achieve this by integrating social media-based commenting and review system. Social commenting is a way of initiating conversation with those who visit your site. You can use a commenting system such as Facebook comments where only commenters with a genuine profile can use their social media account to comment on your posts.
The good thing about these commenting systems is that they can shift through social media comments and rate them. The most like or informative comments will appear on top of the discussion, making it easier for you and other readers to access the interesting and engaging discussions.
Common mistakes to avoid in social media integration
While some brands are doing phenomenally well on social media, others have flopped badly because of poor social media integration strategies. Some marketers who are active on social media cannot prove its effectiveness due to some common mistakes that can be avoided. Here are some of these mistakes to avoid if you want to benefit from social media integration.
1. Irregular posting
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is failing to integrate social media into their daily business activities. You will realize that those who have not benefited from social media do not regularly post content. Their social media and websites are inactive most of the time or randomly post when they come across interesting stuff.
Once you integrate your social media with your website, it is recommended that you post as regularly as possible. Successful companies have attributed their social media success to regular and frequent posting on schedule. Visitors to your site are looking for up-to-date information and will only click that link if you have something new for them.
2. Putting social icon in your header
You may have noticed that some websites have social icons in their headers. When you click on these pages, you will likely see these social icons first. The problem is that some of the people who visit your website will be tempted to click on these social icons and head straight to your social media channels without exploring your website. Driving traffic to a website is not easy, do not encourage visitors to leave your site. To discourage them from leaving, you can put the social icon somewhere in the middle of the blog or the website footer. You can also grey them out like in this page so that they are not the first things people see when they visit your website.
However, if the social media page drives the most lead generation for you, then you can make the social icons more visible and easy to find. In this case, you can place the link on the header where visitors to your site can easily access it.
3. Linking to inactive social account
One mistake that most people do is linking their websites to social media channels that are dead or barely active. Visitors who end up on such inactive accounts will doubt your credibility and lose trust in you. Before you add any social media channel to your website, ensure that it is active and has relevant content. Also, ensure that you are not only present but interacting with people and building networks. If the social media account is inactive, set aside social media integration and first work on social media strategy.
4. Showing low sharing numbers
While social proof is one of the ways to integrate social media to your website, it cuts both ways. If the numbers are big, it makes you popular and you are likely to get more likes and visits to your pages. If the numbers are low, it may mean that your contents are unpopular and that may have a negative impact. You need to pick your widget carefully. Analyze which of your social networks has many social shares and only show its numbers. Alternatively, you can only show the aggregate number for all the social network shares.
5. Beware of Javascript
Social media widgets such as follow, share, and like are built with Javascript and will require to communicate with the server of the respective social media platforms. This extra request may increase the page’s load time. However, social media icons are weightless. To ensure that the page takes less time to load, use simple widgets, or load them with asynchronous Javascript so that they do not load in sequence.
6. Not paying attention to terms and conditions
Another major mistake that some brands and marketers do is violating the platform’s terms and conditions. There are limits to which social networks allow you to integrate their networks. For instance, there are certain rules that you must adhere to when running a promotion on Facebook or when using Google+. Ensure that you do not violet these terms and conditions or else the pages will be suspended or deleted and you will have nothing to link to your website.
7. Overdoing It
While you want to make sure that the information on your website is liked or easily sharable, do not litter your page with social media share buttons. Before you include that share button to the page, ask yourself whether or not the information on that page is worth sharing.
Benefits of Social Media Integration
Now that you know what social media integration is, how it can be done, and some of the mistakes to avoid, you are probably wondering how it can bring value to you and your business. Here are some of the benefits of integrating your social media.
1. Easy posting
One of the major challenges that people handling several social media platforms face is making a post across all the platforms. In most cases, they are forced to cut and paste a post on one platform and post it on all the other accounts. However, with social media integration, you can sync all your social media platforms and make a post across all of them with just one click. The same post will be updated on all the selected platforms. The good thing is that your post is instantly updated without you updating it on each platform.
2. It is possible to schedule post
When you integrate your social media networks, you can schedule a post so that it is automatically posted across all platforms at the set time. This enables your post to become visible to the public at a time when it can have more impact on your business. With manual posting, you don’t need to worry about forgetting to post or posting something in a hurry because it is time to post. You can just schedule a post and forget about it.
The program will do the rest as you concentrate on other things that cannot be scheduled. You also don’t have to worry about your customers in different time zones since the post will reach them at the right time.
3. Content can be the aggregation
When you post on your social media platform, you expect some comments, replies, and updates. It can be daunting and tiring, moving from one platform to another checking for the updates. With social media integration, you will receive all the interactions and notifications from all your social media platforms through one channel. This ensures that you get timely updates as well as react and reply to your followers instantly. You can also get information and updates shared by other organizations that you follow on various platforms.
4. Tracking of analytics and report made possible
Understanding your customers’ trends and behaviors are key to conversions and sales. This enables you to create a brand that meets their needs. As a marketer, you can leverage social media integration to gain a clear understanding of their behaviors and trends. You can use a social media integration tool to get an analysis and data on customers’ likely needs. The tool allows you to monitor various customer metrics such as their engagement, total reach, and impression. You can also view comments, messages, and replies from the customers which can help you to refine your marketing strategy. One of the tools you can use is the hashtag tracking.
5. Facilitates expansion of the business network
Integrating social media and app or website expands your business network and helps your brand to connect directly with target customers. You can easily and quickly identify and understand your customers’ needs and queries.
It also makes it easy for you to communicate important news and updates to your followers in real-time, expanding your reach to an even larger audience. Also, if you follow someone on only one platform (let say twitter), you will still receive updates from them even if you forget to check them out on that particular platform.
6. Information can be passed in no time
One of the challenges organizations face is how to quickly disseminate information to its followers. This is because the followers and targeted customers are scattered across many social media platforms. With the integration of social media, organizations can quickly and efficiently pass information to their followers on all social media platforms. Whether a company wants to recall a product or pass additional information on product use, it can use its integrated social media channels to quickly do so.
7. Enhances website vibrancy
A website is a powerful tool for promoting your brand. However, increasing traffic to your site requires creativity besides SEO optimization. Integrating your social media with a website is one of the creative ways of improving its vibrancy and traffic. This enables it to be a one-stop-shop where visitors can access social live feeds besides just reading through your blogs. The social videos and photos will also keep them entertained as they browse through the site.
8. Easy Management of social media timelines
One disadvantage of having many social media channels that are not integrated is managing them. First, you need a security password for each of them. Also, you will need more people to manage the accounts. However, integrating all these social media accounts into one channel allows for easy handling of the social timelines. Your team members do not need to have all the usernames and passwords for each account to operate them. You can assign them different logins that grant them access to social media accounts.
9. Customer involvement
When customers or prospective ones visit your website, most of them would like a platform where they can interact with you and provide feedback as well as comment on your brand. Integrating social media with your website provides them with a social-media commenting system and review platform where they can share their thoughts with you. With this, you can easily engage them in further conversation with the aim of conversion.
10. Engagement of Event Attendees
One of the advantages of social media integration is that you can engage people offline through social media wall. The tool enables you to aggregate all your social media posts into one channel which can then be displayed on a big screen on any outdoor occasion. This allows guests and participants to see and share things related to your post. When your social media handle is displayed in such gathering, you are likely to get some followers who are interested in your brand.
Final thoughts
Social media integration is a way of bringing together all your social media networks under one channel for ease of management. There are several ways in which you can link your social media with your website. The benefits of doing so are immense, key among them being expanded network and easy management of the account. If you choose to integrate your social media with your website, ensure that the social account is active.