If you’re a business owner with a website, you are probably already familiar with how to incorporate search engine optimization best practices to ensure your site is found on Google and other search engines.
However, are you aware that in today’s hyper-connected social media world, you also need to add social optimization to your to-do list? Having a website that is optimized for sharing on social media will typically attract more traffic and sparks more engagement with customers.
While it seems easy enough, creating a socially optimized website takes some thought and planning. Unfortunately, you can’t just add a few social sharing buttons to your website and calling it a day. To make your site optimized for social media you have to do everything from encouraging more sharing on your pages to seeking feedback from your visitors.
Social media has become a significant player for many business marketing campaigns, which is why it is so vital to ensure that your website integrates well with the various social media platforms. Utilizing social media in your
company’s digital marketing campaigns will help you attract more traffic to your site, enhance your rankings on the different search engines, and help boost your sales.
If you want to attract more visitors to your site, then you’ll have to start working on integrating it with the social media platforms and making it more socially optimized. Here are five tips that you should consider to make your site more social and move beyond merely adding buttons.
Promote a More Social Experience
Many people believe that people will either share something or they won’t and that there is no way to change their mind if they’ve made up their mind not to share. However, this isn’t the case at all. You can encourage visitors to your site to engage more and share your content by choosing more emotionally intelligent words in your content.
What does this mean? It means that when you are creating your content, you need to select words that are
representative of your brand’s personality and choose words that appear more conversational.
A good example would be to change a “Try it now” link to
“Ready to give it a whirl?” By making this simple change in the words that you use, you evoke your visitors into action, while also making the actual act of clicking on the link a more personal experience or the user. When you can make the experiences on your site more personal, it can help those who visit your site more comfortable about leaving a comment or sharing content on your site.
When site visitors become more comfortable sharing your content, you end up reaching a broader audience and can connect with more consumers that fall within your target audience demographics. All of this turns to more exposure for your brand and more targeted traffic being driven to your site.
Improve the Quality of Your Content
Social media is extremely visual. The key to any successful online marketing strategy is to create distinctive and unique content that your customers find interesting and useful. Without this kind of material, there is little to no chance that your target audience will discover your pages and linked to by other sites.
One of the easiest ways to make your company’s site more social is by improving the quality of your content. To do this, you have to sit down and ask yourself whether or not you’re creating blog posts, articles, or videos that are worth sharing. One way to do this is by making your headlines and titles more enticing. It’s also essential that you integrate your sharing buttons closely with the various pieces of content that you post.
The format and length of the content you share is also extremely important. Infographics, short blog posts, and videos are generally the kind of material that gets shared more often compared to long, in-depth pieces.
This is because the shorter pieces of content are more easily and more quickly digested. This has become even more important due to the growing number of consumers who use their mobile devices to gather information and make decisions on purchases.
To create a more social website, make sure you take the time to think about the kind of content your target audience will like and take the necessary steps to improve the quality of the content that you are producing.
When Possible, Incentivize
Humans have an innate need to compete and win, so if you can incentivize the visitors to your site by including gamification features, such as badges, stars, and counts, you can play to this innate need to compete. Sit down and take some time to consider how you can tweak your site so that you can incentivize visitors to share your pages. It may be something as simple as incorporating ratings or voting.
A great example of a company that has successfully incentivized their website is ModCloth’s “Be the Buyer Program.” The online vintage clothing store invites shoppers to vote on the outfits that the company should sell next.
They have also encouraged their customers to promote the outfit on their own social media networks to try and get more votes for the outfits they like best. If an outfit is able to get enough votes, then the online retail store will begin stocking the outfit for sale.
A program like this encourages shoppers to come back to the site often to see the results of the voting, which increases the site’s traffic and potentially boosting sales. Visitors to the site are rewarded by being able to purchase an outfit that isn’t carried anywhere else, so it becomes a win-win situation for all parties involved.
Seek Customer Feedback
If you don’t already ask your visitors what they want to see next on your site, you need to start doing it today. You should never underestimate the power of feedback.
Whether it’s asking them to vote on the next feature, you build on your site or asking them to choose a product they would like to see you sell, getting feedback from your customers is essential. Utilizing crowdsourcing strategies on your website can help encourage more users to be social with both you and with other visitors to your site.
A perfect example of this comes from conversion and retention company KISSmetrics, which spent its entire first year of business asking customers which metrics they needed and where they should be placed in their app.
By relying on the feedback from their customers, KISSmetrics was able to meet their customer expectations throughout its entire platform fully. This approach helped the company increase its customer retention, as well as the likelihood of future feedback.
Diligently Track and Make Adjustments
You might be someone who truly believes that some brands are just more likely to win the social engagement game, but that is rarely the case. Your success will often come down to developing a more strategic way to test your efforts and make the appropriate adjustments to your strategy.
To boost customer engagement on your site, test factors like where to place the sharing buttons and which kind of message best encourages interaction from your customers.
These days, most sites have Google Analytics or other research tools at their disposal, but very few companies are actually using these tools to track their social media traffic, or to gain a better understanding of how visitors are actually engaging with their site. Making simple changes, like using more direct language, can often boost the social activity on your site.
Companies that refuse to test and adjust their social optimization strategies will find that the engagement from visitors quickly fizzles out leaving their competitors to gladly connect with their former fans.
Conclusion
Whether you like it or not, social media is here to stay. If you run a small business, finding your fans on the various platforms can be the life or death of your business. Social media can help you attract more traffic to your site, enhance your rankings on Google and other search engines, and eventually help you boost your conversion rate, which makes ensuring that your website is optimized to work with social media imperative.
Creating a social media friendly site means making sure that your website integrates with the various social media platforms effectively. This means you need to link to the social media channels to help you create unity and ultimately create a connection with your target audience and clients.
Implementing these five tips into your website and social media strategy can guarantee your site will see more visitors and receive more likes and shares, which can help you grow your online presence and reach a broader audience.
You don’t need to shy away from social media, but instead, you should be embracing it as a way to grow your business and convert more customers.