Social media is on the rise and are ever so dominant in the realm of E-publishing. The importance of recognizing social media can help optimize websites to grab more leads, and generate more traffic. Web publishers may overlook such potentials. Below are 5 ways to implement popular social media features onto a website.
1. Adding a Facebook Like Button
To integrate a Facebook Like Button onto a site, you first need to generate some code snippets from their page here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
The most important element to fill out is your URL (example: http://webdesignhat.com) and click get code at the end, facebook will then generate codes you can put into your website automatically.
Explanation of code: Box 1 is the generic code Facebook uses to execute the buttons, it must be placed after the opening <body> tag in your website, Box 2 are the actual buttons that will appear, they can be placed anywhere on your site.
2. Social media integration in WordPress
If you have a WordPress running site and would like to integrate social media quickly and efficiently, there are certain plug-ins that can do the job very easily. One of the most popular is “Share This” located here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/
The plug-in once activated under the wordpress admin area can be easily added to any page or post in your blog. More details of it can be read here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/screenshots/
3. Add Twitter to Your Website
Twitter has become relatively popular amongst social media groups, it offers quick updates to most recent events. However, Twitter alone is not enough, it must be networked and combined with other social media outlets in order to function at its peak.
Similar to Facebook, Twitter integration is quite easy, head to this link: http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets
You can select the type of information you’d like to share on your website through widgets. You can also integrate Facebook alongside Twitter to maximize its capability as well.
Once a widget is selected, you will get the following page where widgets are generated. All that’s needed now will be to put your username and hit “Finish & Grab Code”
And here is the generated code, which you can put onto your web page directly.
A Tool to Increase Your Twitter Exposure
Linking your Twitter account on your website can definitely boost your Twitter followers. But there is a better way to increase your Twitter followers. A tool we recommend to help increase your Twitter followers is TweetAdder. It helps you fine-tune your follower searches by profile keywords, location search, and other useful and critical features that you can never achieve just by using Twitter.com. Try it out and increase your Twitter followers efficiently and expand your brand exposure and reach a greater audience.
4. Disqus All the Way
Another way to integrate social media directly would be using a web gateway called “Disqus”, it has been used by a wide variety of large platform web companies and has social media directly built-in. This means you do not need to know code in order to implement Facebook and Twitter. http://disqus.com/ Users can login to their Facebook or Twitter accounts, come by your site, and comment directly, these comments will show up automatically in their Facebook and Wwitter wall, providing a social media driven “soft marketing SEO”.
Other advantages to services like Disqus would be that it is very easy to integrate on any CMS based systems such as WordPress and Drupal, plus when your site is high on traffic posting comments, Disqus releases some of that pressure and shares part of the data load.
5. Google+ Integration
Google+ has been a popular platform for some time; it acts more as a search component with some social features integrated.
You might be wondering “but Google is a search engine”, how does that relate to social media?
Being a popular search engine tool, social media within Google plus revolves around this concept. Anything any visitor does can be tracked on a website, this is also true for Google+. When someone has a Gmail account, a YouTube account, a Google+ profile active while browsing websites, Google will track this information directly and can be shared by clicking the G+ button.
Integration of the G+ button is pretty straightforward: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/
When someone clicks the button located on your site, not only are they sharing this tracked information to their network of people, but also to Google search engine itself. This can boost site track by heaps if used correctly, even if users don’t click the button, the above code can track visitors that comes back, hence affecting SEO ranking.
