The Importance of Social Media in Web Design

By admin - Wednesday, 22 April 2015 1 Comment

Since 2011 social media has been growing by leaps and bounds and recent research shows that more than 46% people worldwide access social media platforms on a daily basis. In the US more than two-thirds of the adult population uses social media such as Google+, My Space, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Clearly social media is no longer a plaything thing of the younger generation. On the contrary, it has become something that each and every person globally has grown to love and enjoy. Because of its pervasiveness, it is more important than ever to establish a presence for your business or company on these platforms, but even more important is integrating the available social tools into your website during the design. To find out more on the importance of social media in web design, read on.

The first benefit that you will see is social sharing of your message. This enables users to share content on your site or a visit to your business with their friends on various social platforms. This, needless to say, leads to an increase in the amount of traffic that your site will receive and can help push you higher in the search engines results. This is particularly important when it comes to the Google search engine. When it first launched its social platform, Google+, in June 2011, Google picked up 10 million users in its first two weeks and 25 million users in just 4 weeks. In just over a month, Google+ had gained just as many users as Facebook had gained in a period of three years. With these figures, incorporating a Google+ button during your web design is an absolute must. An example of social sharing is seen in online stores where social sharing buttons are available on the product pages.

However, instead of simply providing visitors with the ability to share your content, give them the ability to leave a comment about your content that they are sharing. This can exponentially increase the value of social sharing for your business. The comment could be a question on your product or simply an endorsement. This feature has the ability to grow your word of mouth referrals very fast as the comments are re posted on social platforms, along with a link to the story or product. Replies from others on social media can also be visible on your website as the pages are synched. Allowing user comments has the possibility of getting you bad publicity if you provide poor service. However, when using social media platform comment boxes, the quality of the individual comments will generally increases as individuals are no longer anonymous.
Today more than a billion internet users are on social media. This means that they all have social media accounts, and in many cases an individual will have multiple accounts since many social media networks allow different types of user interactions. Using the new technology that is available, you can enable your visitors to log into your site using their social platform accounts. Recent research showed that 66% of internet users prefer social log-in to the traditional username/password log-in method. Integrating this into your web design means that you receive considerably more visitors than other sites as it will eliminate the need for visitors to remember yet another username and password. In addition, it will offer you a chance to collect valuable data from their social profile which can help you improve your personalization and get to know your audience better.

Given that search engines are beginning to look at your social media presence to determine the importance of your web content, integrating social media into your web design can do wonders.

Source : http://ezinearticles.com



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