If you’re looking for ways to improve your website, you’re likely to find page after page of tips and tricks on web design, all with the aim of teaching you the accepted, normal methods for increasing your position on search engine results pages (SERPs), giving visitors better experiences on your site, and helping you develop a coherent, cohesive brand. While these guides provide many benefits, they often don’t take into account the power of social media and your ability to integrate multiple services into your website, allowing you to easily populate your site with content and drive community interaction, building recognition and your brand while helping your SEO value. Mobile Marketing has contributed to the audience, allowing users to spread the word from where ever they are, using the social media outlets described below. Whether your company provides payroll services or handmade mittens, your website can benefit from increased user engagement and content.
With close to one billion users, the world’s largest social network is a treasure trove of potential for the intrepid webmaster. With the recent changes to Open Graph, Facebook’s developer platform, your ability to tightly integrate your site and services with the network are just a matter of how much time and money you’re willing to spend developing software for it. Plugins like the comments box allow you to easily put a Facebook comment box on any page of your site by filling out a simple form and pasting the resulting code into your html. Any item that would normally have its own comment section is a prime contender for this plugin; Facebook users don’t need to register for your website to leave comments and their friends will see their comment on the social network, increasing engagement on your site by streamlining the comment process and by exposing your content to the massive community on FB. Besides the exposure you’ll receive, the additional comments give search engines like Google and Bing important clues to help them rank you. Comments can be a mixed bag but they do provide depth of content that makes search engines happy. As social signals continue increasing in importance, it will become increasingly important to find ways for social media users to interact with you on their preferred platform.
Integrating Twitter with your website is as simple as finding a Twitter widget that will display a timeline of your latest tweets in a static position on your website, giving visitors a real-time look at what you’re saying and promoting. It can go much deeper than this, though. You can place buttons that allow someone to instantly follow your account or tweet a link to a specific page on your website with a short message. If you have a blog, you could easily include a plugin that finds all Twitter messages containing a link to your blog posts, placing them on their associated pages. This makes it more apparent when people are commenting on your work and makes it easier to track mentions. If you want to be able to quickly notify your followers of a new post, look for services like Twitterfeed that allow you to automatically publish any new item in your RSS feed to Twitter.
In our always-on digital world, social networks and company websites are going to continue becoming more tightly integrated, with intrepid developers constantly developing new ways to sync social media and every other platform conceivable.
