How to Link Your Social Media Accounts to Your Website

Social media integration gives your audience more ways to engage and interact with your brand.

You're creating more opportunities for them to share your content and promote your products/services for you. The best part: It's easy to do.

In fact, with the right tools (which we'll show you) you'll be able to integrate social media with your website, email, and other channels today.

Bonus: Read the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

Why is social media integration important?

First a quick definition: Social media integration is the act of using social media accounts as an extension of your marketing strategy. This is typically accomplished two ways:

1. Directing your social media audience to your website
2. Allowing your social media accounts to be easily accessed on your website

Think about those social media buttons you see on blog posts and web pages. It allows you to easily share an interesting piece of content without having to copy and paste the URL. That's a perfect example of social media integration in action.

Social media integration helps accomplish a few key goals, including increasing your brand reach and awareness. It also encourages engagement with your website and helps build a bigger audience on social media.

It is more important than ever that businesses and brands give their audiences more ways to interact with them. COVID-19 has changed the landscape for how people interact with businesses. More people are turning to social media than ever due to the global pandemic.

In order to help keep your brand awareness afloat (or even increase it), you'll need to integrate social media throughout your communication channels.

Social media integration strategies for your website

Your website and social media should work together seamlessly. This helps promote your brand while boosting traffic to your social media accounts.

To help, here are three tips to integrate social media onto your website.

Add social sharing links to your blog posts

These are the social share buttons you see at the bottom of most blog posts. They sometimes also appear at the top.

They help increase awareness of your content, while also giving your readers a seamless way to share your content. The improved user experience will be a boon to your website.

When adding social share buttons, our best piece of advice is to keep it simple. You don't need to add every. Single. Social. Media. Platform.

Instead just focus on the few platforms that are relevant to your brand.

Don't spam your website with them either. Just keep them focused on the sharable pieces of content like your blog posts and videos.

Best practices are to place them at the top, bottom, or along the side of your page.

If you're wondering about how to actually get social share buttons, here are a few WordPress plugins we suggest:

• AddThis
• Social Snap
• Easy Social Share
• Shareaholic

Add social posts to your website

One great way to spruce up your website while integrating social media is by including a feed of social media posts on your pages.

Here's a great example from Ferrari. Notice how it's both a call to action and also an effective plug of their Instagram account:

These are typically live feeds of your social media posts. However, you can also use a branded hashtag in order to showcase a feed of posts from your followers and fans.

The positive clothing brand Life is Good takes this approach with their hashtag #ThisIsOptimism.

Those who post an Instagram photo with them wearing a Life is Good shirt and include the hashtag have the opportunity to be featured on their feed on their website.

Here are some WordPress Plugins for integrating social media feeds on your website:

• Instagram Feed Pro
• Walls.io
• Curator.io

Create a social login option

Have you ever gone to a website that allowed you to login using your Google, Facebook, or Twitter account? Those are great examples of social logins!

Not only is this a great way to integrate social media on your website, but it's also the way most people prefer to login. In fact, one study from LoginRadius found that 73% of users prefer to login using their social media accounts.

That makes sense. After all, it's so much easier to use a social media account to login than creating an entirely new profile, picking a password, and confirming it on your email—only to have to log in again when you're done. Instead, it's just a few clicks at most and you're in.

Diving a bit deeper, most users prefer to login using their Google account—by a very large margin. In fact, 70.99% of users surveyed preferred Google, whereas only 20% preferred Facebook and 9.3% preferred Twitter.

WordPress plugins for social login:

• LoginRadius
• Nextend Social Login
• Social Login

Social media integration strategies for email marketing

Here are a few good ways you can integrate social media into your emails. Doing so will allow your readers to easily and quickly find your social accounts and follow you.

Add social sharing links to your footer

Your emails are the perfect place to add social sharing links. Like your website they can go to the top or the bottom of your email.

Most often though, the social sharing buttons are at the footer of emails. In the example above, everyone's favorite freaky fast sandwich shop Jimmy John's includes their three biggest social media accounts on the bottom of their promotional emails.

Any good customer relationship manager like Mailchimp or Constant Contact will give you options to include social media sharing links at the bottom of your emails.

Remind subscribers of your social community (and incentivize them)

One great tactic for social media integration is sending out email blasts showcasing your social media accounts.

This is a great way to invite your subscribers to connect socially by incentivizing them with the benefits of doing so.

Here's a good example from Urban Outfitters:

Source: ReallyGoodEmails

With this email they both call attention to the great photos on their Instagram account while also promoting their brand of stylish, hipster clothing.

Bolster social media campaigns with email blasts

Have a social media giveaway or contest? Or maybe you have an audience poll you want peoples thoughts on? Maybe you're trying to collect some user-generated content for a blog post?

Email blasts are a great way to promote them. This is when you send a single email to your entire list asking them to complete a call to action.

Here's a great example from Handy:

Source: ReallyGoodEmails

They let their customers know they can win prizes on their Twitter account, see fun photos on their Instagram, and watch helpful videos on their Facebook feed.

How to use Hootsuite for effective social media integration

Now that you know of a few good reasons you should implement social media integration, let's take a look at how Hootsuite can help you optimize your social media game.

Create and schedule your posts in one place

With Hootsuite you'll be able to integrate your social media accounts into one simple dashboard. This allows you to create a cohesive content calendar for all of your marketing plans.

This allows you to get a big picture view of your social media accounts and make adjustments if necessary.

Plus, not only can you see what content is slated to be posted, but you'll also be able to create new content right on the dashboard. With just a few clicks, you can also schedule them to post later too.

Here are a few articles to help you get started posting on Hootsuite:

• How to Schedule Tweets to Save Time and Engage Your Followers
• How to Bulk Schedule Social Media Posts (Up to 350!) and Save Time
• How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar

Respond to customer service inquiries

Remember: Social media integration is all about using social media as an extension of your brand. That's why it's so important to be aware of your social sentiment (i.e. the emotions and feelings your audience has towards your brand) throughout your digital marketing efforts.

A good way to keep social sentiment positive is by responding quickly to any questions or comments your customer has on social media. This might be a DM on Twitter or a message on Facebook or a comment on LinkedIn.

Hootsuite Inbox gives you one dashboard to engage with your audience across all your social channels. With it, you'll be able to speak to and answer any questions from your customers via your social media accounts with ease.

To learn how you can use Hootsuite Inbox for your social media strategy, take our free course on the tool today. There's also this helpful article on how to use Hootsuite Inbox.

Use Hootsuite to schedule posts on all the major social networks, monitor relevant conversations, and track your engagement—all from the same dashboard. Try it free today.

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How to Link Your Social Media Accounts to Your Website

Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-integration-for-your-website/

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