The importance of social media today can hardly be understated. That’s as true in the world of Internet marketing as it is for society in general. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are already used by thousands of savvy businesses as a way to reach the hundreds of millions of social media users who might be their potential customers.
Creating an attractive and informative Facebook page for your company will get it in the social media game. Establishing a Twitter account and tweeting regularly about exciting company news, such as new products and upcoming sales, is another wise marketing move. To fully exploit social media, however, you need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to your website to spread the word about your company. That’s where social share buttons come in.
The most well-known share button is Facebook’s iconic “Like†button. Visitors to your site who find it interesting or useful can recommend it to their Facebook friends with just a single click of the button. That is, they can if you’ve made the effort to put the Like button on your homepage.
And you should make that effort – social media’s influence is still on the rise, and the potential payoff in SM publicity is huge relative to the small investment it takes to make share buttons a part of your web presence. Social media sharing is essentially electronic word-of-mouth advertising. It’s in social media’s nature to quickly propagate information to exponentially growing numbers of people: When one person brings something to the attention of his or her social media contacts, each of them may pass it on to more people, each of whom might also forward it, and so on.
With that in mind, these social share buttons should find a prominent place on your webpage:
- Facebook Like button – As mentioned previously, the Like button is a quick way for Facebook users to recommend a website or a specific piece of content such as a blog post or video. Each user’s “Likes†appear on his or her Facebook wall and may appear in friends’ Facebook news feeds.
- Facebook Share button – Visitors to your website who click this button are given a choice of sharing links to your content in one of several ways. Visitors can share links on their personal walls or on the walls of any Facebook pages they administer, on specific friends’ walls, in a private message to a friend, or on the walls of any Facebook groups they belong to. The person sharing the link can also add a comment or message to go with it.
- Tweet button – Visitors to your website who click your Tweet button will put a link to your site into their Twitter feed, along with comments of their own if they wish. Their Twitter followers will be able to check out your site and retweet the link to their followers in turn.
- Google +1 button – +1 is Google’s much-anticipated new entry into the world of social media. The +1 button will have much the same effect as the Facebook Like button – by clicking it, people will be making recommendations to other Google users. As with Facebook “likes,†Google +1’s can potentially radiate out through a person’s web of friendships and acquaintances. The importance of +1 is likely to grow rapidly because of Google’s dominance of Internet search. Google search results will begin showing how many users have given their stamp of approval to an item by showing the number of +1’s it has received. Even more significant for SEO, Google search rankings in the future will likely be partially determined by how many +1’s each possible search result has received. Rankings may even be personalized to give more weight to those items that have been given a +1 by others in the individual searcher’s social circles.
Although these four social share buttons are the big players, there are a number of others such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Tumblr and more. CyberMark International offers award-winning Internet marketing services that include designing and updating websites to include social share buttons. Browse the CyberMark website to see our full range of services. For a free consultation, call .
