Social media influences the ways in which today’s businesses operate. It impacts your marketing, customer service, and branding.
But social media is also transforming how businesses design their websites. Understanding the interaction of social media and knowing how to harness that into your website ensures the success of your business online.
Incorporating social media into your website design is critical to adapting your business to the needs of today’s users.
Bridging Your Website and Social Media Traffic
Social media platforms can be used to drive traffic to your website. But many businesses are leveraging the power of doing just the opposite.
By directing your site’s visitors to your social media pages, you create a more interactive experience that adds value to your products and services. Also, connecting with your visitors through social media supports your branding efforts.
Today’s websites use social media buttons that are strategically placed on their site’s pages to encourage greater interaction with customers. These are placed in the menus, headers, and footers of websites.
Clicking social media buttons takes users to social media profiles that give them more information about your business and new ways to engage with your company.
The Move Towards Visual Content
Social media is a great way to monitor the content that online users engage with the most. Over time, visual content such as videos and infographics have proven to generate a higher level of engagement.
Text-only content provides users with important information, but it doesn’t always capture their attention as well as compelling images do.
Website designers are using more visual content in business websites, which converts attention into interest for your products and services.
With so much content being presented to online users, it’s become harder than ever to capture and hold their attention long enough for them to become interested in your offer.
The best web designers incorporate powerful images that serve your business objectives. Knowing how to craft these images is critical to the success of your website.
A New Way to Advertise
Social media platforms allow businesses to advertise to a targeted audience. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms have extensive user data that helps you reach your ideal customer. Creating ads for social media requires some key considerations.
Each social media platform is unique, and your ads must be in line with the design of your website. When a user clicks on an ad to land on your home or sales page, their experience of your brand should remain consistent.
Successful social media advertising can only result from the integration of your website’s design and the social media ad campaigns you implement.
Raising the Standard for Web Design
Many of the key features of social media (links, mentions, comments, hashtags, etc.) are now essential to the website design process.
Like social media platforms, today’s websites can build communities around products, services, or a given topic. Websites can become their own social platforms, which increases the engagement, credibility, and trust around your brand.
Your site’s design must consider the needs of today’s online users and incorporate social features into its functionality. It needs to provide information about your business while informing, entertaining, and connecting users in the same ways as social media.
These are just some of the ways that social media is transforming website design. Understanding how social media works and the behaviors of its users gives you greater insight into creating a more engaging and effective website for your business.
Let us know how you’ve incorporated social media into your own design in the comments below. If you’re not sure how to align your website’s design with today’s social media landscape, include your questions as well.
We’ll help you develop a comprehensive design strategy that’s aligned with your business goals while creating a higher level of engagement with your ideal customers.
