When you’re investing time to build a great social media strategy with engaging content, it can be frustrating when you see little interaction or no results on your social media channels. That’s why capturing the customers that are already on your site is so important. They are already interested in what your company does. Use your website to make a great your first impression by placing social media icons on your website to capture their interest and get them to follow, like, and share your content.
Having social media like and share buttons can increase your social media mentions by a lot. But too many buttons placed up, down, left, right and in the middle of your pages can take away from the user’s experience and give the impression that the company doesn’t know what they’re doing or who their audience is.
You may already have these social media icons on your site and have probably seen them all over other sites. If you’re like me, I look for a site’s Facebook and Instagram buttons right away. It’s often a good way to see if a company is credible and to find reviews.
Sometimes a site’s icons aren’t placed in appropriate spots. They cover the text you’re trying to read or are poorly placed all over the site’s pages. So…
Best placement for social media icons on websites
Chose only the social media icons your business is most active on, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest to put on your site. You may have more social networks you’re active on (Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, etc.), but they may not be where your customers are, and therefore the content won’t get shared. Having too many icons dilutes your efforts by giving visitors to your site analysis paralysis – too many options they can’t make a decision.
The best place to position these buttons is generally on the top or left side of a page because of the way we read and view a site. Also, it may seem silly to put them above a post, but studies show around 60% of content is shared socially before it is even read.
Of course, every site is designed differently and the most important thing is to test and see what works best.
The floating social media bar
One popular option is the floating social media icon bar. These are the icon bars you see hugging the side of a site. They provide constant easy access for a user to share the content they are engaged with. They also help solve the problem of placing multiple icons throughout a page and appearing spammy. If you use a floating social media bar, make sure it doesn’t float on top of your content and take away from your page’s readability.
Social media icons in the footer
When users are specifically looking for links to your social networks, they will often scroll to the bottom of a site to find them in the footer. Make sure your social media icons located there link to your social media profiles and are a good, visible size.
Where not to place social buttons
Don’t place social sharing buttons on your conversion pages. These are the pages that include a buy, signup, or book now CTA. Social sharing buttons can take away from the travel booking process flow.
A well placed social sharing button makes it easy for your content to be shared, increasing your reach to new customers and visitors.
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