Social Media And Web Design
It’s amazing how far social media has come in such a short space of time – from a niche tool for geeks to the mainstream in 5 years.
A great example of this is how people around the world are getting their news. A fascinating article by The Pew Research Centre entitled The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook illustrates just how many people now get informed by Twitter and Facebook before traditional media sources – it’s truly incredible.
But what does this mean for web designers? How can we incorporate social media into the websites that we build? Well there are lots of options ranging from the simple and basic through to the tricky and clever.
- Basic Links
The most basic form of social media integration within a website is to provide links to social media platforms. Everyone is now used to seeing links in footers of website to Facebook, Google+, Instagram etc. Part of the appeal here is to show people that you have these pages and feeds set up, you’re basically saying look at me I’m connected. Statistics show that not many people actually follow the links. - Share, Like & Follow
A step up from basic links is giving your website visitor the ability to interact with a social media platform from your website. A very popular form of this is seen on e-commerce websites where people are encouraged to like and or share a product. Clicking a button will tell Facebook that you liked something or that you’d like to share it with your Facebook friends. One neat trick you can add here is to add what Facebook rather weirdly call Face-Pile. This means that you can see you the faces of people that like a product.To do this you’ll need to set up the Facebook Page Plugin – more information about that here.
- Show Feeds
Another way of integrating Social Media within a website is to actually embed the feeds on a page. You can do this with Twitter – here is a example: www.eastsfootball.com , scroll down to the Wet Weather information and you’ll see a great way of a community sporting club combining their media channels in an efficient and user-friendly way.Another option is to embed Instagram images. You can do this based on a particular hashtag or based on a users uploaded images. A good example of the latter can be seen here: www.malaysiaholidays.com.au – scroll down to just above the footer.
For more information about the Instagram feed option check out this blog post by BA Creative: http://bacreative.com.au/2016/06/why-you-should-add-an-instagram-feed-to-your-website/
So, there you have it, 3 options for adding integrating social media into your website – get out there and get social!