How to make your website social
If you’re like many others, your website was created several years ago. And now you may have a presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and others.
So how can you quickly and easily integrate your social media efforts into your website?
Fortunately, there are a couple fairly easy ways.
Help others connect
Make it easy for your website visitors to connect with you on social media! Include links on every page of your website to your various social media pages.
If you’re running a WordPress website, we recommend using the Black Studio TinyMCE Widget. It will allow you to insert content in your sidebar as easily as if you were editing a page in WordPress.
Once you’ve installed that, you can really use any social media icon set you’d like. There are hundreds of them out there, so here are a few different articles elsewhere that share multiple sets:
- 15 Beautiful Free Flat Social Media Icons Sets For Web, Illustrator, Photoshop and More
- 45+ Fresh and Free Social Media Icon Sets
- 40 Sets of Free Social Media Icons
- 20 Free Social Media Icon Sets to Use on Your Website
Stock photo websites like Depositphotos and iStock have social media icon sets as well.
Of course, many of the social media websites will supply their own icons as well. Here are where you can grab those for some of the popular social networks:
- Facebook’s Brand Resources
- Twitter Brand Assets and Guidelines
- LinkedIn Brand Resources
- Google+ Branding Guidelines
- YouTube Downloads
- Pinterest Brand Guidelines
- Instagram Press Center
Officially, some of those companies say you’re required to use theirs instead of other icon sets that replicate their logo.
Help others share
Letting website visitors know how to connect with you is the first step. The second is making it easy for others to share your content.
Simple Share Buttons is a great way to add sharing options on your site. You can add it to any site, but there’s also a WordPress plugin.
There are a lot of options that make Simple Share Buttons extremely flexible. However, the single biggest thing I like about this one is that the default settings are to have the counters turned off.
When a sharing button shows how many times your content has been shared, that means it has to communicate with the social media website. And when it does that, it increases the time it takes your page to load.
Multiply that times several social media sharing buttons, and you may have a problem. Not only are people more likely to leave if your page takes longer to load, but Google will penalize your site’s ranking in the search engines.
Simple Share Buttons does have a paid version as well that has built in tracking and some additional features. I’ve never used it, but it’s a steal at just $10 if any of the features appeal to you.