Adding social media links to your website is a way to increase the virality or k-factor of your content. You want to make it easier for people to find the other content presences you maintain for your business.
- The links automate the sharing and linking processes.
- They increase your brand reach and awareness.
- They improve trust and authenticity; you can connect user in more meaningful way and show them who you truly are because users are not looking for well-refined brand.
Learn more about Milestone social media analytics.
Should you drive traffic to your social media sites as well as from them? The answer is yes depending on how your customers move through the customer journey and what touchpoints they seek as they go. User-generated reviews and ratings are important in all B2C categories from makeup to clothes to restaurants to autos. In B2B, review sites like Trust Radius and G2 Crowd are sources people go to for comparison and community feedback and reviews. Those sites offer free plans and additional features and exposure with paid plans.
Marketers should take a broad view of what home page means now; it is really any place that represents your brand, product, and value and helps propel customers on their journey to selecting you. And Google is the home page of all your home pages with 80%+ of digital journeys going through Google at some point.
In addition, your social media profiles help distribute and amplify your content. Most social media sites use no-follow links, which means they do not give SEO link equity, the broader distribution gives you a better chance to reach someone who will reference it and use a follow link.
To drive traffic from your social media sites:
The key places to link to your site from your social profiles are usually in the About settings:
- In Facebook it is in: Edit Profile, Contact and Basic Info, Add a Website, (must set to public to use), add a link to you site.
- In LinkedIn it is in: Edit Page, Overview, and add your full URL. You can View as member to check it and you will see the Visit Website in the upper left under
your logo. - In Twitter it is in: Edit Profile, Website.
When you link to your site, you can add UTM trackers for the channel and property and campaign, but Google Analytics can usually identify them even if you do not.
Here are three key reasons for why you should link to your social networks from your website, and best practices when adding them:
- Link building: As search engines get smarter, it is increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the ways to make sure people can find your business online when they search. It makes sense that you want to get quality links pointing back to your website, but why would you link away from it? The simple answer is that you also need to build search relevance for your business on the different social media channels. Building quality links for your social networks helps those display more prominently in search results, which assists your overall business presence online and can help you find people to link to the content on your site.
Improving your overall digital presence: Although it may sound backwards, adding links to your social channels from your website actually helps increase the chance that users will find your website when they search on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other engines.- Get the user interaction smooth and right: Just having the links on your site isn’t good enough – you want to make sure that it is easy for users to find them, so they can interact with you wherever your business lives on the web.
There are multiple plug-ins to choose available for common platforms like WordPress.
Learn more about social media platforms in our new Guide to Social Media Marketing 2021.
At Milestone, we follow three key guidelines when adding links to social icons:
- The social links/buttons should be at the top or top side of every page on your website
- Links or buttons that are persistent or stay with the user as they navigate through the site or from page to page are optimal
- To make sure users don’t leave your website completely, make sure the links open the social media channels in a new tab or window.
While being active on social media channels can help you build or retain a solid audience, you want to do everything you can to make sure that both the search engines and your target consumer market can find you with the greatest of ease.
Making connections across the web between content that you control is a great way to maximize your presence and ensure you can get the largest number of eyes on your products and services.
Find more social media trends and best practices.
