By As marketers, our job is to engage audiences wherever they are and give them the most positive, cohesive brand experience possible. That’s exactly what social media integration can help you achieve.
Be successful with social media on behalf of your clients by downloading “The ultimate guide to effective social media for business” now.
By integrating social media accounts with client websites and other marketing channels, you can create a unified social proof ecosystem that helps your SMB clients meet their business goals faster and more efficiently.
After reading this in-depth guide, you’ll have 10 strategies you can start implementing today to take your SMB marketing efforts to the next level through integrated social media marketing.
Table of Contents
- What is social media integration, exactly?
- Why social media integration matters
- 10 must-know strategies for integrating social media
- Add social sharing buttons to your website
- Create social media campaigns to drive website traffic
- Embed social media feeds on your website
- Use social media posts to promote email signups
- Run retargeting campaigns on social media
- Incorporate social media into your email marketing campaigns
- Create social media ads to promote products or services
- Use social media analytics to inform advertising campaigns
- Integrate social media with customer support
- Use social media management tools to streamline social media accounts
- Best practices: Get the most out of your social media integration
- Vendasta’s Social Marketing tools to the rescue
- Frequently asked questions
What is social media integration, exactly?
A helpful way to think about social media integration is as a two-way street. Your SMB clients have their websites, which are important for generating conversions, providing product and service information, and more. They also have their social media channels, which are essential for building an audience, engaging with customers and prospects, building brand and product awareness, and—ideally—promoting more conversions.
Through website social media integration, you can create a two-way street that links a client’s website to their social media channels. This way, their website encourages visitors to follow along on social channels, while each social channel effectively drives traffic to the website.
There are lots of ways to go about website social media integration, but at the basic level, all the strategies we’ll look at today help to build this valuable two-way street.
So, why should you or your clients care about integrated social media marketing? There are plenty of good reasons to make it easier for customers to navigate effortlessly between websites and social media pages:
- It helps to build a consistent brand experience: When customers can jump between a website and social accounts with a single click, it helps them experience both as being part of the universe of the brand. Instead of a patchwork of branded touchpoints, they are immersed in the brand experience.
- It promotes customer engagement: Social media tends to be better suited to customer engagement, so ensuring that website visitors join the conversation on social media can help boost engagement for your clients. Given the role of social media in reputation management, this can help you create a positive online reputation for your clients.
- It boosts reach: Creating a two-way street through website social media integration invites social media users to check out the website and vice versa, expanding the SMB’s reach. By selling social media packages and establishing integrations, you can help clients get in front of far more potential buyers.
- It facilitates better data and analytical insights: Connecting a website CRM with a social media integration can help SMBs collect valuable data about where traffic is coming from, how traffic from different sources converts, and other insights that can help them tailor their integrated social media marketing to maximize revenue.
Why social media integration matters
Website and social media management integrations is just one of many hacks that can help your SMB clients get more juice out of all of their marketing efforts. Here are some of the benefits you can expect as a result of using an integrated social media marketing approach.
Increased engagement
Today’s customers expect far more from brands than they did in the past. It’s no longer a one-way conversation involving brands shouting at customers, hoping to get a sale.
Now, it’s all about fostering a mutual conversation between brands and their audiences to create a sense of trust, transparency, and community. That’s exactly what greater engagement is all about, and through social media integration, you can expect to see a serious boost in user engagement too.
Increased brand awareness
Competition is fierce across just about every industry, and if your SMB clients want to stand out, they need to prioritize building awareness. Social media is an unignorable venue for boosting awareness, given that the average user spends nearly 2.5 hours each day on social media.
Through effective integrated social media marketing, they can get in front of more prospects, more frequently. The result? When a business is top of mind, customers are more likely to buy from them.
A better experience for customers
Effective social media integration creates a frictionless experience for customers. One minute they’re reading a social media blurb, the next minute they’re adding a product to their cart with just a few clicks. The fewer hiccups customers encounter, the more positive their experience will be.
Levelled-up lead generation and sales
The point of all digital marketing is, ultimately, to generate more sales. That’s exactly what website social media integrations achieve, by helping potentially interested browsers become serious leads and increasing the conversion rate for those leads.
10 must-know strategies for integrating social media
1. Add social sharing buttons to your website
Incorporating social sharing buttons in savvy locations on your clients’ websites invites visitors to share the content across their social channels.
If a visitor sees something they love on your website, a social sharing button removes the friction of copying and pasting a URL, taking a screenshot, or using some other workaround to share the content.
Keep it uncluttered and relevant: there’s no need to litter the website design with social sharing buttons, but a few well-placed ones can help that content get legs and travel farther across the web, landing in front of more interested prospective customers.
2. Create social media campaigns to drive website traffic
It’s not uncommon to get caught up in vanity metrics, such as the number of likes on a social media post, and to forget that there are tons of ways to put those posts to work generating more money for the business.
One example? Social media campaigns designed to boost website traffic. Consider running social media contests to get in front of new customers, or using your social media presence to promote exclusive content that can only be accessed on the website.
3. Embed social media feeds on your website
By using a social media integrator on your client’s sites, you can keep the website fresh without having to directly update it all the time. Instead, when new content is posted to social media, it will also appear on the website.
This can also be an effective way to showcase user-generated content (UGC), which is perceived as more authentic and real than brand-generated content. For example, on a product page, you might want to integrate UGC that real customers have created about the product.
Similarly, social media integrators can be used to showcase positive customer feedback, upcoming events shared on social media, and more.
4. Use social media posts to promote email signups
Email lists are marketing gold: they still deliver some of the best returns in the industry, with an impressive 36x ROI (HubSpot). Social media can be used to promote email signups by incentivizing audiences through lead magnets, webinar signups, loyalty program points, and other nudges.
In turn, those emails can be used to market to audiences and drive them to the website.
5. Run retargeting campaigns on social media
Retargeting campaigns are useful because, unlike other ad campaigns that cast a wider net, they focus specifically on people who have already demonstrated an interest in the business. A website social media integration makes it possible to collect data about who has interacted with a website via social login, or a social media page so that ads can run just to those people.
6. Incorporate social media into your email marketing campaigns
Clickable social media links and icons should be incorporated into just about every email your clients send, inviting subscribers to follow along on social media. This gives people who have already expressed an interest in the brand by signing up for its email list to engage more deeply with it on other social platforms and media. As a result, SMBs can create more loyal, dedicated, and engaged customers.
7. Create social media ads to promote products or services
Despite plenty of recent changes to privacy laws, advertising costs, and even conversion rates, social media remains the place to run ads. Specific products, collections, product pages, or entire catalogs can be integrated with social media accounts and presented through ads, driving clicks, traffic, and ultimately, conversions back to the main site.
8. Use social media analytics to inform advertising campaigns
Social media analytics can be a gold mine of actionable data, helping you craft more effective advertising campaigns for your clients. For example, people who have interacted with social media accounts can be targeted in retargeting campaigns, and popular posts can be repurposed to run appealing ads. A social media integration tool like Vendasta’s Social Marketing can help you collect and access this important data.
9. Integrate social media with customer support
Instead of making customers navigate to a contact page on the website to get in touch if they need support, why not use existing social channels, where they are already engaged, to deliver customer service? Using a social media management integration like Social Marketing makes it easy to use social media to address concerns in real-time from an integrated dashboard, rather than having to use social media apps themselves.
10. Use social media management tools to streamline social media accounts
Social media management tools like Social Marketing makes it easy to schedule posts across a wide range of social channels, monitor social media activity, track performance, and engage with audiences, all from one convenient place.
Best practices: Get the most out of your social media integration
There’s no denying that an integrated social media marketing approach can help you achieve better results for your clients, but if you want to maximize their revenue, stick to these best practices.
Define the goal
It's helpful to establish clear and measurable social media goals. These may include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Driving website traffic
- Generating leads
- Improving customer engagement
- Improving customer response time
- Boosting sales
By setting specific objectives, you can create a targeted strategy that addresses your most pressing needs and measure the success of your social integration efforts.
Be selective when it comes to platforms
Each social media platform has its audience and culture. Chances are, your SMB clients don’t need to be on every platform. Doing so can distract them from focusing on the ones that are most well-aligned with their brand.
Instead, when you sell your social media management packages, help clients understand the benefit of focusing on the platforms that align with their audience and marketing objectives. For example, if your client's goal is to showcase their visual content, consider using Instagram or Pinterest to display social media videos. If they’re a B2B company looking to connect with professionals, LinkedIn might be a better fit.
Create integrations with other channels
Social media integration isn't just about connecting your clients' social media accounts to their websites. It can also involve integrating social media with email marketing platforms, advertising accounts, and other marketing channels. Creating more integrations helps to promote a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints.
Measure outcomes
Knowledge is power, and when it comes to marketing, knowledge is analytical data. Using analytics tools like those included in Social Marketing to track key metrics like engagement, traffic, and conversions can help keep you honest about how your marketing efforts are going, and identify opportunities for how to optimize your strategy and improve outcomes.
Vendasta’s Social Marketing tools to the rescue
Vendasta’s Social Marketing tools are created with agencies in mind, helping you manage your client's social media strategy with ease.
Here’s what you’ll find:
- A single dashboard where you can post once and publish your content to all the social media accounts, locations, and channels your clients are active on
- Post scheduling enables you to create batches of content, sit back, and relax
- Robust analytics for a deeper understanding of audience behaviors, helping you craft more effective marketing campaigns
- Social media lead generation tools to help you identify the perfect audience on social media
- A single dashboard for customer conversations across multiple platforms, plus an AI marketing integration that can be used to respond to reviews, create social posts, and more
- Ecommerce integrations to turn any Instagram into a shoppable page
- Link tracking to better identify which links and social pages generate the most traffic
- White-label social media management services enable you to scale your agency to new heights without hiring
Plus, since Social Marketing is part of Vendasta’s ecosystem of digital solutions, it can effortlessly integrate with other tools on the platform.
For example, if you sell advertising, website services, SEO, reputation management, or just about any other digital marketing solution, you can integrate the various tools from the Vendasta Marketplace to create the perfect marketing platform for your agency. Couple this with a variety of powerful agency automations at your fingertips, and you’ll be well on your way to having your best year yet.
Frequently asked questions
Can social media integration help me streamline my social media management?
Yes, social media integration can streamline your social media management by connecting your social media accounts with your website, email marketing, and other marketing channels. This approach allows you to efficiently manage content, monitor engagement, and track performance across multiple social media platforms. Using social media management tools can further simplify the process by enabling you to schedule posts, analyze data, and manage all your client's accounts in one place.
How can I measure the effectiveness of my social media integration efforts?
To measure the effectiveness of your social media integration efforts, identify key performance indicators or metrics that align with your marketing goals, such as engagement, website traffic, or lead generation. Regularly monitor and analyze these metrics using social media analytics tools to track your progress and optimize your strategy. By comparing the data before and after implementing social media integration, you can assess its impact on your marketing performance and make data-driven decisions to improve your overall marketing performance.
