Is Your Website Social Media-Friendly?

In today’s time and age, social media has become a hub for digital interaction. For most people, it has outgrown from a source of entertainment to regular activity. The countless hours most people spend watching Facebook videos or scrolling through their Instagram feed reveal the prevalence of social media in our lives. Social media has become the bee’s knee for growing businesses, providing businesses with the opportunity to appear where people spend so much of their time.

Your website must be social media friendly. It must integrate effectively with all major social media platforms to create a seamless experience between your website, social media accounts, and customers. A social-media-friendly website can help you gain exposure, improve SEO, and boost conversions.

In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to ensure your website is social media friendly. So, without further ado, let’s dive into it!

Does Social Media Impact Search Rank?

Google has frequently said that social signals such as Facebook likes and Twitter rank have no impact on search rankings. However, the fact remains that these search signals indirectly influence SEO rankings. For search engines, social posts on Twitter and Facebook are considered the same as any other online page. Matt Cutts, the Google spam master, has previously indicated that Google does not seek to monitor every social media post. As social media platforms are inherently dynamic and unpredictable, doing so can cause challenges. As numbers and links constantly change, Google has less faith in search signals as a direct factor in their results.

Social networking is a great way to get your message to a broad audience. Integrating social media directly into your website can allow users to share valuable content with their network easily. More people will see your content, leading to more site traffic and linking authority. These signals tell Google that your website is a good source of information regarding a particular topic.

Consider a viral blog, article, or video: wouldn’t it influence your overall ranking if it went popular on social media? Of course it would! According to marketing expert Brian Honigman, social shares remain a highly effective method for authoritative link building. Social media does not directly impact your search rank on Google. Still, it plays a vital role in increasing site traffic and building authoritative links, ultimately enhancing your overall ranking.

Social Media Friendly Website Checklist:

Making your website social media friendly is easier said than done. It requires significant effort and technical expertise to integrate your social media with your website effectively. Fortunately, we have curated a social media-friendly website checklist to help your website become social media-friendly. This checklist includes a list of practical tips and techniques that you can implement to take your website’s social media friendliness up a notch.

1. User Friendly

User-friendliness is not explicitly related to social media friendliness, but it plays an important role. Ensure your website is user-friendly, has easy navigation, loads quickly, and features responsive design (works well on mobile). After all, your goal is to bring more people to your site from social platforms and boost your sales. So, if your website isn’t user-friendly in the first place, there’s no way you would be successful with social media friendliness.

Your website must be mobile-friendly, especially if you are a B2C company. Most people use their phones to access the internet, so your website must be mobile-friendly and easily accessible through social media platforms. According to statistics from the research portal Statista, mobile users account for more than 50% of worldwide Internet traffic. Thus, it is easy to comprehend the consequences of not having a mobile-friendly website. Again, simply having a mobile-friendly website is insufficient; optimise it for speedy access and easy navigation.

2. Fresh & Engaging Content

No one wants to read boring or outdated content. Even tonnes of social proof, the most attractive links to your profiles, widgets, and stunning visuals won’t be enough if your content doesn’t connect with users. People share information they connect with, whether it’s amusing, instructive, or buzz worthy. If you have all your feathers in a row, but users still aren’t sharing your content, it’s time to get serious and ask yourself the following questions:

• The purpose of a social media landing page is to achieve a single goal with a simple layout. Therefore, make your overall design minimal and simple.
• iKeep the copy on your landing page brief and sweet. Visitors are there to act, not to read a long blog article or listen to a sales presentation. With a compelling title, you can immediately capture your audience’s attention and make a great first impression.
• It’s critical that the messaging on the landing page corresponds to what you mentioned in the social media post that drew your audience’s attention. To ensure that your messaging is consistent, compare your landing page to your social ad or organic post to ensure that everything you advertised on social media is clearly visible on the landing page.
• Most visitors to your landing page are probably already interested in your offer. But whether it’s completing a purchase, signing up for a trial, or entering contact information, a compelling CTA is often required to encourage them to take the last step.
• If you’re in the eCommerce sector, try including a discount or consider raising the deals you’re presently offering. Remove any credit card information required for trials and demos to reduce possible friction points. Consider a free tier for events to boost attendance—and then upsell to happy guests later.

Content isn’t simply for decoration. It should be rich in value and provide relevant information to the user. Meaningful content keeps people engaged and can help you capture your target audience. Build a reputation for original, high-quality content, and you’ll be well on your way to a devoted audience. Periodically update your old content, even if it falls under the category of evergreen content, and re-share it on social media to grow your reach.

3. Add Social Sharing Buttons

Nowadays, almost every company is active on social media. If you want to keep your finger on the pulse, you’ll need to compete on these platforms. Linking your social media profiles from your website is one of the simplest ways to promote them. Consider also where you will place them. Do not place links to your social profiles in the content of your page.

4. Add Links to Your Social Profiles

Nowadays, almost every company is active on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Therefore, you must join these platforms to stay current with the crowd. Putting links to your social media profiles on your website is one of the simplest ways to promote them. An important point to consider is where you’re going to place them. In general, it depends on the overall design of your website. However, make sure to follow a simple rule: do not place links to your social profiles in the content of your page.

For maximum exposure, you can put them in your header, where they’ll be most visible to the users. However, you can place them in the sidebar or footer if you want to keep your header clean. Wherever you place the links to your social media profiles, make sure they are easily identifiable and self-explanatory.

5. Allow Logins Using Social Accounts

Many websites ask users to register for an account by entering their email addresses. Most users find the procedure time-consuming and abandon it without creating a new account. The good news is that you can allow current and potential customers to log in using their social network accounts. So, let users sign up and log in to your site using their social accounts via Google, Facebook, or Twitter. This option will improve the user experience and increase the registration rate.

Due to Apple’s iOS update in 2021, we recommend creating a login on your website to build your database of people’s details. You can use email addresses as first-party data to remarket across social platforms and Google. Logging in via social platform integrations may take this away as the website may not have total visibility to add to its database. The info would instead belong to the social platform. Giving people an incentive to sign up to your website may be a way around this obstacle.

6. Like and Comment on Your Content Using Social Profiles

Comments on the content can help you in different ways, from sparking conversations to getting valuable feedback. However, allowing everyone to comment on your content without verification can lead to spam. Therefore, it’s important that you use some sort of authentication for moderation purposes.

Most people only allow registered users to comment on their content. In other words, if you haven’t registered on the site, you need to sign up before you can leave a comment. As we discussed in our last point, this discourages many people who end up leaving your site without sharing their valuable insights on your content and can also be an effective way to capture people’s details directly on the site for remarketing. Registration for comments is not a bad method for data capture but becomes more effective when coupled with the login techniques mentioned above.

A great way to enhance engagement on your content is to enable comments on your content using social media profiles. For instance, you can allow users to comment on your blog posts using their Facebook, Google, or Twitter profiles. This strategy will not only encourage more people to comment on your content and boost your engagement, but it will also help you with user authentication. So, it’s a win-win situation for you.

7. Integrate Social Widgets

Integrating social media widgets is the perfect method to display your social network feeds casually. Avoid using a social networking widget for a platform you don’t care about maintaining, as it will stand out like a sore thumb. Showcase your Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest profiles if you spend much time on them. It’s a simple way to include visual components and encourage users to interact with your content.

Using the Instagram Feed plugin, you can integrate your Instagram feed into your website. It lets your visitors follow you with just one click and adds some branding-specific graphic elements to your webpage. Click to Tweets is another fantastic option. Tweetable quotes encourage your audience to act and promote your content. Most people will enjoy your blog content but tap away without sharing it. Quotes are only a gentle poke! These plugins and widgets provide a virtual nudge to your website visitors.

8. Control Your Social Sharing Display with Open Graph & Meta Tags

Social media is a great source of driving traffic to your website. Optimising your social media presence by tweaking your Open Graph tags is important. You might have crammed all the right keywords in your profile bio, and you’re using all the right hashtags on your posts; however, can you tell what a post will look like when others share a webpage from your site on their profiles.

We can neither control what strangers say about our content nor compel them to attach an attractive image to increase our click-through rate. Someone sharing your content on social media may miss vital information or may not share it in the most presentable form. Such situations are where Open Graph tags come in place. You can specify exactly how your content looks when someone shares it on social platforms using Open Graph.

What Is an Open Graph?

Open Graph is a protocol that enables any web page to turn into a rich object thanks to social graphs. Open Graph allows you to tell social media platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook what information to present when someone shares a link from your website. Social tags work similarly to search engines. Search engines look for relevant information on your website to show it in the search results. Likewise, social networks do the same thing for the social graph by searching for their tags (Open Graph, Twitter Cards, Scheme.org). The social graph is a means of defining “things” in a digital world, and it might include objects like theatres and stores, media like movies and TV shows, resources like websites and articles, and people like TV hosts and movie stars.

What Happens When You Use Open Graph?

When you share content from your website on a social media platform, the crawler for that network scrapes the HTML of the shared URL. With no Open Graph data available, the scraper must determine which information is essential on its own, which can be an unattractive experience. When this happens, social media platforms sometimes display a confusing title with a ‘default’ description and a poorly cropped image.

These posts generate little to no engagement and do not attract users’ attention as they scroll through their feeds. Such posts may even harm your engagement rate because of their odd looks. Open Graphs allows you to make sure information is easier to find for the user and is appropriately presented across all social media platforms.

How to Use Open Graphs and Meta Tags?

Now that you understand what Open Graphs and Meta Tags are, let’s take a step further and see their different types, what they do, and how you can implement them for enhanced social media presence:

og:title

This tag is like your standard HTML title tag, where you define the SEO title of your webpage for search engines. The og:title is the object’s title that should appear within the social graph. Your og:title needs to be clear without mentioning the name of the brand or domain, with a maximum limit of 95 characters. Try to keep it short, sweet, and to the point!

Example: <meta property=”og:title” content= “The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Placement for SEO”/>

og:type

This tag essentially tells what your object is: a video, an article, a recipe post, or a blog. You might also be required to enter other properties depending on the object type.

Example:

og:image

A plain link to a website without any image attached can look suspicious, which is why this tag comes into action. Specify the URL of the image you want to show next to your content in the social graph. Doing so can help your post gain attention as users scroll through their feed.

Example: <meta property=”og:image” content= “https://pureseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Digital-Marketing-Company-NZ-Pure-SEO-1.png”/>

og:url

This tag is for defining the URL of your post, webpage, or object. Only the domain is visible in the social graph, so don’t worry if you can’t see the full URL. Although this might seem unnecessary, this tag helps to define the URL for the content, which otherwise might have multiple URLs. Use this tag for a clean URL without any parameters or session IDs to ensure all shares get attributed to a single URL rather than different URLs.

Example: <meta property=”og:url” content= “https://pureseo.com/blog/seo/keyword-placement”/>

og:description

This tag is optional; however, we highly recommend using it as it helps users to assess whether they want to click on a post or not. Try to develop a relevant two-liner description to entice users to visit the content on the page or the post.

Example: <meta property= “og:description” content=“Keyword placement is vital to the success of the SEO process. Read our keyword placement guide below to better understand how to implement it on your website and its SEO benefits.”/>

9. Optimise Your Social Media Landing Page.

A social media landing page is where you want your followers to go. It’s the page where visitors arrive after clicking the link you published on your social media. You can use social media landing pages in both sponsored and organic campaigns. Make sure your social media landing page features an amazing responsive design that works perfectly on mobile and desktop devices. By using a well-designed landing page, you can direct your visitors toward a clear objective and improve your campaign results.

Instead of linking to generic destinations like your company’s homepage, social media landing pages allow you to send your audience to mobile-optimised or campaign-specific destinations. Once your visitors land on your social media landing page, it’s time to compel them to do what you want, i.e., convert them into potential customers. Building an effective social media landing page is easier than you might think. Keep the following guidelines in mind:

• The purpose of a social media landing page is to achieve a single goal with a simple layout. Therefore, make your overall design minimal and simple.
• iKeep the copy on your landing page brief and sweet. Visitors are there to act, not to read a long blog article or listen to a sales presentation. With a compelling title, you can immediately capture your audience’s attention and make a great first impression.
• It’s critical that the messaging on the landing page corresponds to what you mentioned in the social media post that drew your audience’s attention. To ensure that your messaging is consistent, compare your landing page to your social ad or organic post to ensure that everything you advertised on social media is clearly visible on the landing page.
• Most visitors to your landing page are probably already interested in your offer. But whether it’s completing a purchase, signing up for a trial, or entering contact information, a compelling CTA is often required to encourage them to take the last step.
• If you’re in the eCommerce sector, try including a discount or consider raising the deals you’re presently offering. Remove any credit card information required for trials and demos to reduce possible friction points. Consider a free tier for events to boost attendance—and then upsell to happy guests later.

10. Reverse Traffic

Your goal is to drive traffic from your social media profiles to your website. It’s also vital to ensure you drive traffic to your website’s social media. By doing so, you will be enhancing the exposure and following on your social media profiles, ultimately bringing more traffic to your site. Most importantly, it will generate a loop where your traffic will switch between your social media and website, and your audience will expand with each iteration. In simple words, if you give exposure to your social media accounts, they will return the favour with interest. So, instead of simply focusing on driving traffic from social media to your website, try to reverse the traffic from your site to your social media accounts.

Which Social Media Platforms You Should Target?

Ideally, you should target all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. We understand that working on all social media platforms simultaneously and managing them is tiresome and requires a lot of resources. However, you should go down this road until you figure out which platforms work the best for your business. Once you know which platforms are more suitable for your business, you can put your primary focus on those platforms and reduce the frequency of posts on the others.

According to Search Engine Journal, GrowthBadger, and The Economist, Facebook is the top platform for social media referrals. This is understandable given that Facebook has always been the most popular social media platform. Similarly, if your Tweets become viral, Twitter can significantly impact your business and generate a lot of traffic. TikTok is another emerging social media platform that has disrupted the whole industry. Marketing on TikTok can help you gain a lot of exposure with an excellent engagement rate. Check out our comprehensive guide on TikTok Marketing to see how it can work wonders for you.

According to the study, Instagram and Pinterest are among the social media networks that produce the least traffic compared to other popular social media platforms. However, clicks are on the rise, and ad spends are declining for brands that appeal to these distinct user bases. Therefore, brand relevancy—on Pinterest especially—is crucial. Click-through rates for Instagram and Pinterest remain low compared to other platforms, but these are spaces to watch.

Determining the best social media platform for your company and market is essential to boosting website traffic, and the best way to do it is to get your hands dirty and give all the major platforms a try.

So, Is Your Website Social Media Friendly?

The answer to the question of whether your website is social media friendly or not depends on how well it scores according to the checklist. You can review your website thoroughly and tally it with all the points mentioned in our checklist to evaluate where you stand and take appropriate action to enhance the social media friendliness of your site. You would surely witness a boost in your traffic and engagement rate as you make your website social media friendly.

If you are struggling to enhance the social media friendliness of your website or lack technical expertise, you can always reach us. Here at Pure SEO, we stand proud as the best Digital Marketing Agency in New Zealand, offering top-notch Facebook marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation, and several other services. So, what are you waiting for? Fill out the Contact Us form, get in touch with our experts, or drop an email to schedule a free meeting.