Having a social media friendly website is crucial for reaching your audience online – but what does “social media friendly” actually mean? Being social media friendly is more than just baking cookies for Facebook over the holidays and smiling as you check your Twitter notifications (in fact, it is neither of those things). It means creating a website that seamlessly integrates with social media, so that you can reach a larger audience and generate leads more effectively.
If you want your website and your audience’s favourite social media platforms to really get along, then here are a few key things that you need to be doing.
Good Content
Let’s start with the basics: if you want people to visit your website, you need to make it worth their while. Regardless of who they are, your audience is looking for something interesting, relevant, and well-written that they can share with their friends. This means that your website needs to have a blog that is being regularly updated with quality content.
First off, your content needs to be interesting which, simply enough, means crafting content that appeals to your audience’s interests. Imagine that you’re one of your potential customers – what are your hobbies, values, favourite TV shows? Blogging about subjects that are related to your services (and incorporating fun topics) will position you as a thought leader and build trust with your audience. Try to avoid coming off too sales-y or stuffing your posts with keywords – people hate knowing that they’re being sold something.
Second, you need to make your content relevant by keeping track of what’s trending on social media in your industry and with your audience. This part takes some research, but will give you a deeper understanding of your customers and make it way easier to create share-worthy content. Even if it’s something seemingly unrelated, putting your own twist on a current trending topic can take an informative blog post to the next level. Whether it’s Beyonce, Beyonce, or even Beyonce, tying your content to something trendy will give people that extra push to share it on Facebook right away.
Finally, your content needs to be readable: make sure that you are proofreading, editing, and using spellcheck.
Responsiveness
No, this isn’t about whether your website returns your Facebook messages or not. I mean, you can tell that they read it at 4:45 PM yesterday, but they refuse to… Ahem, where was I? Right, website responsiveness. Double-check that your website works across the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer) and also shows up properly on mobile and desktop. A slow-loading, non-optimized, or broken mobile page can easily turn away a potential lead; if you want people to share your content, they need to be able to see it.
Social Integration
You need to make it as easy as possible for your audience to engage with your content on social platforms. Cut out the legwork and fully integrate your website with social media by using social logins and sharing buttons.
If users need to register to use your website or leave comments on an article, consider giving them the option to sign up through one of their social profiles. Let’s face it – when was the last time that you enjoyed filling out a registration form? Social logins make it easier for people to sign up for your website and encourages them to share content since their accounts are already synced.
Social buttons are a perfect way to make sharing your content straightforward for your audience. Make sure every post has an easy-to-find set of buttons featuring all of the major social networks. Share counters also increase your credibility and give social confirmation to your content.
Optimization
Social media is highly visual, so you need to make sure that your content is optimized to look its best on social platforms and encourage people to click through to your website. Always add a title tag and meta description to your blog posts – this will make your snippets look all pretty on Facebook and give people more context as to what your content is all about. Also, be sure you’re following Facebook’s guidelines for generating handsome link previews – include an image in your blog post that is larger than 600 x 315 pixels to get one of those nice, big snippets to show up in the feed.
Have any more questions about getting friendly with social media? We can help.
