Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Integration: How to Keep a Balance

For many marketers, social media is integrated in almost every aspect of their marketing campaigns. Many of them, however, don’t think about its influence on website traffic. You must have heard about immensely positive effect social media integration can make, but there is another side of this coin. Social media and your website should work seamlessly together to promote your brand. Simply speaking, you need to keep a balance. In this article we will tell you about the golden mean and advantages and disadvantages of social media integration.

The best way to showcase your business is a website. But what about social networks? Syncing a social media with the service your website offers can help your online presence be more visible. Still, social media can cost you a lot of traffic as well, as when visitors see a social sharing button, they often click on it and say “bye-bye” to your web-platform.

Advantages of Social Media Buttons

Social media integration is one of the most popular and efficient ways of marketing strategy today. People can’t imagine life without Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts. They check them every second, giving you an awesome opportunity to generate tremendous online exposure for your brand, showcase your products and services, and increase brand recognition and conversion rates. Through social media you can hear what people say, including your customers, prospects, peers and competitors.

There are a few cases when it is truly effective to let your visitors follow you on Facebook and leave your website:

• if you post content on your social account regularly and it has the same information as on your website;
• if you interact with users by means of accounts and build solid relationships with them.

In such cases you may be confident that visitors won’t leave your website for social networks or forget about you and your service.

Disadvantages of Social Media Icons

Almost every website contains a homepage featuring a few social buttons. This can be a major reason why users leave your web-resource. Big, eye-catching media icons on the webpage header attract the viewer’s attention a lot. It is often the color that makes these buttons the most visually prominent part of the page. If you want to add social media, change the color so they aren’t so noticeable. You can also move them to the footer, which is probably the best idea. Don’t worry about whether people will be able to see them. Those who want to follow your page will find these icons regardless.

You don’t have to link to all social media channels you’ve created. Only link pages that are actively managed. For instance, if you constantly update your Facebook page, but don’t pay much attention on Twitter, link out only to the active channel, otherwise it can cause more harm than good.

Let’s Recap

So arm yourself with these 4 weapons for a successful web campaign:

1. Don’t set attractive social icons on the top of your web page.
2. Try to make them less colorful and locate them in footer.
3. If you place social buttons on your website, constantly update your social pages and give a subscriber the ability to know everything about your products or services through these pages.
4. If you don’t want to be active in social networks, take away the social icons.

We hope that our tips about social media integration will help you to develop better marketing strategy and create efficient interaction with your visitors!