Social Media Integration is the act of using social media platforms as part of you or your client's digital marketing strategy. This means having active social media accounts and linking them with your brand website.
Social media helps build trust, credibility, reputation, and awareness around your brand. It is an integral part of marketing yourself or a business. It keeps your users within the ecosystem of your website and social media platforms.
Facebook has a massive audience reach and is great for customer interaction. Though paid ads can get expensive, those are optional.
LinkedIn is a great business to business (B2B) social site for promoting business-related content. It is not designed for eCommerce and is better for home businesses and freelancers.
YouTube is a great video-based platform that drives more conversions and shows off your brand's personality. Videos can take longer to produce, as users have high expectations for video and audio quality.
Instagram is highly, visually appealing and is more popular with the younger generation. Metrics can be misleading, as followers doesn't equal engagement.
On Twitter, ads see more success than
Facebook. It's easy to engage with followers and easy to target with '#' and '@.' Though
there is more "noise" to compete with.
Social Media Integration is important to business owners, because it is a big part of an integrative marketing plan that generates leads and shapes the perfect funnel, in which customers are kept in the business's ecosystem, their website and social media platforms.
Drives Sales
DO put
social icons in your footer and grey them out.
DO pick website
widgets carefully, as some can slow down your website.
DO link to
social accounts where you share consistently and are active.
DO put
share buttons on eCommerce pages.
DON'T
put social icons in your header.
DON'T pick widgets with a lot of
heavy JavaScript.
DON'T link to dead social
accounts.
DON'T add share buttons to service pages.
One example of a business with successful, social media integration is Lion Brand Yarn. What do they do that makes them successful. The following pictures will be examining how Lion Brand Yarns utilizes social media integration on both their social media platform, Facebook, and their brand website.
Having a very visible sign-up link on their Facebook header makes it easy for users to subscribe to their main website.
Always link to your main website on your social media and make it obvious.
All of Lion Brand's post link to a knitting pattern or article on their main website, keeping their users in their ecosystem. In this case, Lion Brand is linking to a blog post about Valentine's knitting patterns.
From their Facebook post, users are connected to their website content, which for this case is their Valentine's gift guide, that lists knitting and crochet patterns.
On any one of those patterns, there are share buttons for users to share what project they are making or want to work on.
There is even a rating and comment system for said patterns where any user may rate the difficulty of pattern, whether the instructions are clear, or may ask for general help.
On the footer of Lion Brand Yarn's
website, there are social media buttons where users can connect to Lion Brand's social
media of their own choice and volition.
If you end up doing email marketing for your services, adding social links to the footer of those emails is the perfect opportunity to integrate social media. It's a great reminder for your subscribers to connect socially.
You can incorporate social buttons to enable users to log in through their social media profiles. This provides users an easy, convenient step to sign-up to your website as well as collecting social insights.
Created with
Website Design Program
