How to Tie Social Media into Your Website

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Written By Robert Dunford
I am a Marketing Consulting in the Great Toronto Area with over 25 years experience in building and implementing marketing plans for small business.

When was the last time you used a social media sharing button on a website?

Judging by how marketers are placing them, it was probably ages ago. It might give rise to the opinion that using social media for branding this way is never going to work for you. However, that’s not necessarily true.

When it comes to sharing, it’s perfectly logical why you’d want to have sharing buttons with your content. People like to share things they agree with, and by doing so, they increase your social proof. Everybody wins, except when your website optimization and setup is working against you. Let’s have a look at how to tie social media into your website and have the best B2B social media strategy possible.

Be Clever About Using Social Media for Branding

One of the problems of marketers incorporating social media into sites is that this functionality is everywhere, even where it isn’t needed or not making sense. To be successful here, you need to think about what people are inclined to share. Is the share button going to be useful on a product page of an e-commerce site? Not likely. Or, on an About page of a small business? Probably not.

As a consequence of putting social media sharing buttons where they don’t belong, websites experience negative social proof and lower conversion rates. What’s more, the buttons are often distracting and not user-friendly, which further puts people off of using them.

Good Content and Functionality Are Key

When you’re using social media for branding, good material will often be in the center of your efforts. It can also be your most reliable ally when it comes to incorporating social media into your website. However, having high content is often not enough on its own – if you want shares, you need functionality as well. A button that requires you to jump through hoops only to share an article is not going to be used.

To figure out how to solve this issue, it’s always a good idea to see what the industry giants are doing. If we take a look at HubSpot, we can see that their social sharing functionality is superb. Highlighting the text brings up the social media sharing buttons, allowing users to quickly highlight the part they liked in the article they’re sharing. They also have a high citation, since the content you copy from their website is automatically posted with quotation marks and a link to the source article. In the case of HubSpot, social media plays a huge role in their branding, which proves that it can be done.

Any branding tool can be powerful once you learn how to use it. Despite that, earning attention and respect online can be an uphill battle for many businesses. Sometimes it can take months to see the results of your digital marketing strategy.

If you’re not up for waiting that long to have your business branded and noticed, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d be happy to help you with your digital marketing strategy and discuss how you could improve it.

Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consultant in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years of experience in implementing marketing plans for small businesses.

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