Tips for Integrating Social Media into Webpage Design

One of the best ways to increase traffic flow exponentially is to encourage social sharing and incorporate social media campaigns into your on-page optimization efforts. Integrating social components into your web pages will encourage readers to share your content, and create an interactive content viewing experience that is more enjoyable overall. Integrating social media into on-page content goes beyond linking people to your Facebook or Twitter account, as there are automated methods to not only interlink your social profiles with your website, but also drastically simplify the process of sharing information and entertainment provided on your pages. The following three methods are perhaps the most effective ways to integrate social media into your webpage design:

 

Ways to integrate social media into your webpage design:

Insert Facebook Comment Sections and Like Buttons below Your Posts

Given the fact that Facebook is the largest and most influential social network in existence, interfacing all of your pages with this Internet mega-presence is highly beneficial. You may have seen a page in which you had the option to add a Facebook comment through your account. When you do this, the fact that you have commented on the page is shared on your wall, so all of your friends are encouraged to visit the page and chime in on the discussion. Fortunately, adding a Facebook comment section to a post is as simple as downloading and utilizing the freely available official Facebook Comment Plugin. Another advantage of using this plugin is that you can jumpstart discussions and encourage visitor interaction by being the first to comment on your own posts, or asking one of your friends to do so. Likewise, adding a Facebook like button to each of your pages is an excellent way to generate traffic and gauge interest simultaneously.

Add Social Media Sharing Extensions to Your Pages

If you’re using the most popular content management system, WordPress, there are a number of plugins that can be installed on your site that will allow users to instantly share your pages on a variety of social networking sites. The most notable of such plugins include AddtoAny, AddThis, Socialize, and Shareaholic, all of which add convenient widgets that contain button icons (that when clicked automatically prompt a visitor to log into their associated social networking site and share the content on your page) to your post. These plugins also make it very easy for someone to bookmark your page in an online account so they can easily access it via their favorites from anywhere, or share a link to your page via email. AddtoAny has recently become the most popular of the aforementioned plugins, probably because it utilizes a smart algorithm that reads a visitor’s history to determine what their most visited social sites are, and then places these sites at the top of the widget for easy access.

Share Your Latest Tweets with the Twitter Widget

Although Twitter is a very simplistic social networking site, it is particularly useful for keeping your devout readers and site fans up-to-date with all of the latest content you’re posting. Another great webpage design idea is to link your followers to pages on your site is a great way to funnel traffic from Twitter, but first, you have to somehow get your site visitors to begin following you on Twitter so that you can keep them updated in the future. The easiest way to do this is to incorporate the official Twitter widget into each of your pages to serve as a friendly reminder for visitors to begin following your tweets. In addition to boosting the number of site visitors to become your followers, the Twitter widget also offers a streaming log of your latest tweets, thereby offering dual promotion between your Twitter account and website.