13 New Ways to Incorporate Social Media into your website

It has become undeniable; social media is the most important medium for discussion in our world today. With this in mind, it’s critical for businesses, causes and individuals alike to integrate social media into their website whenever possible. Not only does it help you to direct more of your readers to these platforms, but it also spices up the site and can make it more pleasurable to read.

Draw Attention to Your Latest Photos

According to Hook Agency, the experts in Minneapolis Website Design, creating a running feed for your website is simple, and it allows you to get more use out of your social media content. Apps like Facebook and Instagram can easily be integrated into the sidebar of your website so that you can have a running feed of your latest beautiful, moving and powerful photographs.

Encourage Readers to Share

Asking people to share your content isn’t enough, you need to make it as simple as possible. To achieve this we can use integrated social media sharing buttons, ideally, custom-made for your aesthetic, so that you can boost the number of people who can come into contact with your articles.

Integrate Social Media Posts into Your Articles

Ideally, your social media shouldn’t be separate to your website; it should all be seamlessly integrated. Through a variety of plugins and applications, you can directly embed your social media posts into the articles, which can look particularly great using Instagram.

Rather than including plain image files, using an embedded social media post gives you the same result but also encourages readers to click and follow you on your social media accounts as well.

Create Un-indexed Content for Your Followers

Your social media followers are some of the most valuable that you will have and for this reason, it’s often useful for you to go out of your way to care for them. One way that you can do this is to create unique and secret content for them.

Using your website, this is relatively easy to do, particularly if you utilize the next strategy as well. By non-indexing the page you can prevent Google from listing it and therefore keep it relatively secret.

Lock Existing Content Behind a Social Media Wall

To make it even more secretive and therefore valuable to your social media followers, you might decide to lock it behind a wall. Similar to how newspapers and media agencies lock content behind paywalls where you require a subscription, you can do the same, requiring people to follow you on at least one social media platform to unlock the secret and valuable content.

Utilize Giveaways Appropriately

While some might argue otherwise, giveaways can be a fantastic way to generate media attention and to increase your follower count. It’s inadvisable to overuse them, but when utilized in combination with content on your website they can help to drive new readers to your social networks where they can become long-term fans of yours.

Add a Twitter Feed to Your Site

Adding a twitter feed to your sidebar or homepage can help you to share more content concisely, as well as to encourage your readers to become social fans as well.

Allow Signups Using Facebook

If your website has a section which people can sign up for, which is highly advisable in most cases, allowing for integrated Facebook signups make it easier for your audience as well as giving you access to them.

Use Social Media Comment Integration

Similarly, if you accept comments on your articles to generate discussion, integrating through social media can help to generate far more attention than a simple generic comment section would.

Quote Your Social Media Followers

Rather than treating social media as a one-way channel, think of it as a constant discussion. One simple way to make your followers feel important is to include them on your website, often in the form of a quote or a post which can be easily embedded using an API or plugin.

Ask for User Generated Content

Similarly, you might put out the call on your social media networks to ask for user-generated content. This content could be social media posts, photos or even essays which your audience wants to share on your site.

Analyze the Analytics

Through your social media networks, you can get a wide variety of data which when analyzed can give you useful information about your audience and the types of content that they like. Using this data, you can inform decisions on content and aesthetic for your website.

Add Cookies for Ad Targeting

Finally, even if you have no plans to use paid advertising currently, collecting the data using cookies can be incredibly beneficial. These cookies allow you to collect a ‘list’ of people who have visited your site and then target them in the future by running ‘like’ or ‘follow’ campaigns to encourage them to become social m