3 Key Reasons to Add Social Media Links to Your Website

Adding social media links to your website is a way to increase the spread or k-factor of your content. You want to make it easier for people to find the other content platforms you maintain for your business.

1. The links make the sharing and linking process more convenient.
2. They expand your brand reach and awareness through the users’ networks.
3. They help increase the people who subscribe and follow you.

Learn more about Milestone social media analytics.

Should you drive traffic to your social media sites as well as from them? The answer is yes depending on how your customers move through the customer journey and what touchpoints they seek as they go. User-generated social media are important in all B2C categories from makeup to clothes to restaurants to autos.

In B2B, review sites like Trust Radius and G2 are sources people go to for comparison and community feedback and reviews. When you add the G2 link to your site, your G2 average review stars show up on many of your site listings in the SERPs. You can also consider GMB and your Google Posts a platform worth linking to.

Marketers should take a broad view of what home page means now; it is really any place that represents your brand, product, and value and helps propel customers on their journey to selecting you. And Google is the home page of all your home pages with 71%+ of digital journeys going through Google at some point.

In addition, your social media profiles help distribute and amplify your content. Most social media sites use no-follow links, which means they do not give SEO link equity, the broader distribution gives you a better chance to reach someone who will reference it and use a follow link.

To drive traffic from your social media sites to your website:

The key places to link to your site from your social profiles are usually in the About settings:

1. In Facebook it is in: Edit Profile, Contact and Basic Info, Add a Website, (must set to public to use), add a link to your site.
2. In LinkedIn it is in: Edit Page, Overview, and add your full URL. You can View as member to check it and you will see the Visit Website in the upper left under your logo.
3. In Twitter it is in: Edit Profile, Website.

When you link to your site, you can add UTM trackers for the channel and property and campaign, but Google Analytics can usually identify them even if you do not.

Here are three best practices to keep in mind when you link to your social networks from your website:

1. Link building: It makes sense that you want to get quality links pointing back to your website, but why would you link away from it? Distributing content increases the chances that someone will find your content and link to it outside of social media, like on a blog. The mention of your brand an products is a signal to the search engines that improves your presence.
2. Improving your overall digital presence: Although it may sound backwards, adding links to your social channels from your website actually helps increase the chance that users will find your website when they search on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other engines.
3. Get the user interaction smooth and right: Just having the links on your site isn’t good enough – you want to make sure that it is easy for users to find them, so they can interact with you wherever your business lives on the web.

There are multiple plug-ins to choose available for common platforms, like WordPress.

Learn more about social media platforms in our new Guide to Social Media Marketing 2021.

At Milestone, we follow three key guidelines when adding links to social icons:

1. The social links/buttons should be at the top or top side of every page on your website
2. Links or buttons that are persistent or stay with the user as they navigate through the site or from page to page are optimal
3. To make sure users don’t leave your website completely, make sure the links open the social media channels in a new tab or window.

While being active on social media channels can help you build or retain a solid audience, you want to do everything you can to make sure that both the search engines and your target consumer market can find you with the greatest of ease.

Making connections across the web between content that you control is a great way to maximize your presence and ensure you can get the largest number of eyes on your products and services.

Find more social media trends and best practices.

New Milestone whitepaper: Why Facebook Is Important for Marketing