The Top 5 Ways to Include Social Media on your Website

When creating a website, you want to have ways for visitors to share your website with their community. So whether you use social media or not,you need to have your website set-up so visitors can spread the word for you.

Why do this?
It’s called Viral and Word of Mouth Marketing. When a visitor clicks the like button on your services page or does a tweet about your latest blog post, your information gets posted online and shared with all of THEIR friends and followers…not yours.
So if someone has 200 friends on Facebook, the potential for these people to see that activity occurs and this comes with a link back to your website. That is why, no matter what your stance on social media is, get that website ready for anyone to share.
The Top 5 Social Media Tools I like to make sure are included on websites we create for clients are:

1. A Facebook Page Like Box on the website – preferably the sidebar. This allows for people to “Like” your page direct from your website. Visit Facebook’s Plug-in site to set this up.
2. Visible Social Media Share buttons. Ensure that people can share content where it makes sense (i.e., tweet your blog posts or like them on Facebook or share it on LinkedIn).
3. Social Media Links to connect with you. Make it easy for people to connect with you online – it could be the start of a great relationship. Use unique buttons to make them stand out. Google “free social media icons” and download something different.
4. Add Facebook or Google+ Comments to your site. If you can do this, the opportunity to have comments posted that share on other social sites will help boost your visibility as opposed to plain comments that stay on the site.
5. Integrate Google+ Authorship on your site. This allows for a picture of you to show in online search results that lead back to your website. This is eye-catching and makes you stand out in the search results page. You can learn more about this here.