Social media has become the key medium for users to communicate with brands and businesses. If you aren’t already using social media as a driving force for your business’ growth strategy, you’re not only missing out on an essential tool but are also putting your profitability at risk by ignoring it.
But, using social media and getting high ROI from it are two very different things.
One way of getting ahead of your competitors is by blending your website with next-generation social solutions. This could involve adding new features that you might not have thought about using.
The idea is to increase customer engagement, improve user experience, boost traffic, and ensure that everybody is talking about your brand.
How can you make this happen?
1. Higher engagement and better user experience with social login
If you’ve never heard of social login (you’ve probably experienced it), it’s a service that allows users to register on a website with their already existing accounts, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The most evident advantage of social login is a rapid, frictionless signup that boosts conversions. Most users prefer logging in with their existing social accounts and avoiding the need to remember another username and password.
But, there’s more to social login than just convenient signup.
Every time a user logs in to your website with her social credentials you obtain her profile data. This information can then be leveraged to drive more meaningful interactions with users and to understand who they are and what they want.
The idea is to offer a personalized user experience, leading to better brand engagement, targeted lead generation, and better conversions. Marketers can identify the data points that are consistent with their current marketing strategies. This data helps businesses personalize their website experience for users and micro-target them with special product offers and discounts.
2. Understanding users through social analytics
Knowing whether your social media activities are delivering any value to your business is crucial to maximizing social media ROI. Making use of social analytics will help you keep tabs on the activities of your users as well as the impact of those activities on your business.
The use of social analytics means you no longer have to guess whether your efforts are delivering returns. You get a bird’s-eye view of all your activities and the ability to dig deeper into all aspects of social media.
3. Customizing user interface (UI) with social sharing buttons
Ordinary social share buttons are passé; if you want to maximize the benefits of social sharing on your website, it’s time to optimize your widgets and make them stand out.
It’s pretty simple – when you optimize your social share buttons to elevate them from the commonplace, you can put yourself ahead of the rest.
4. Spreading the love with a social invite
Implementing a social invite solution encourages your users to invite their friends on different social networks like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, as well as email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo, to your website.
Now, here’s the thing. Readers won’t send an invite just because you’re asking them to. You’ll need to incentivize the social invite they are sending their friends. Reward them with special offers, a discount, or anything else you can think of to make them your brand ambassadors. These users will be bringing high-quality referrals to your site, so think of the right incentive as a way of saying thank you and also making sure they keep inviting their friends.
Related Class: Finding Influencers to Amplify Social Reach
5. Social commenting to further discussions
Allowing users to post comments through their social accounts is a great way of enabling users to share their comments on their social profiles. This helps spread the word about your business and drives more visitors to your website.
For example, users can share comments with their friends or with people who like your page by using their Facebook identity to post comments. If they’ve checked the Post to Facebook box while adding a comment, the content they’ve commented on will appear in their friends’ newsfeeds. A single social comment has the potential to bring in a large number of visitors to your site.
Over to You for Implementation
Now, before you think this is way too difficult and will require significant amounts of time and expensive in-house web development, there is an easier way: a social login platform such as LoginRadius can integrate all these features for your web and mobile applications with a few clicks. Social login providers develop, maintain, and update the plugins – all you need to do is implement.
Next-generation social solutions are about taking the next steps in leveraging social media and optimizing it for your website. It’s about shifting to overdrive and implementing solutions that will entrench your website deeper in the social media ecosystem. Social is becoming a staple in today's business world, and implementing these solutions will immensely improve your web presence.