Why Every Business Should Add A Social Media Widget to Their Website
Almost all businesses are using social media. In fact, 91.7% of U.S. marketers use social media for marketing purposes, according to Statista and this number continues to grow. Even though social media is not the only leading promotion strategy for businesses, it is still one of the most effective ways.
All businesses use social media, but not all are leveraging the opportunities to expand reach and grow engagement within their networks. Many marketers focus only on the platform itself and creating and promoting the content within the platform. There's also a huge opportunity to integrate social media efforts with your website.
Social Media Benefits
There are a ton of benefits to using social media. The benefits that most businesses get from using social media effectively are:
- increased brand awareness
- increased sales or leads
- community engagement
- growing the audience
- increase traffic to the website
All of these can be achieved through social media, and results can be amplified when integrating your social media content into your website. Social ecommerce is also becoming more popular, with platforms rolling out features that allow users to shop directly through social media.
Your Website Is The Hub of Your Activity
As powerful and widely used social media is, your website is really your hub of all activity. In most cases, you want your social media content to drive traffic to your website in order to convert the audience to a lead or sale.
This is why it's important to take a look at your website and look for opportunities to improve your results.
This is why we love Curator.io
I've worked on websites for longer than social media has been around. And in that time I've tried too many options to count when it comes to solutions for integrating your social media content with your website.
One of the first times I created this integration was years ago for a gourmet popsicle business that used a Twitter feed to tell their fans where they could find the popsicle cart for the day. Fans loved this feature because they could check the website or Twitter for the information - and it didn’t require them to have Twitter. The client loved it because they could post something on Twitter and it would automatically appear on their website. But the implementation was not easy, and it took a lot of time and resources for a developer to customize the design.
Great implementation of the most recent Tweet, but if you only knew the amount of time and energy and resources that went into creating this.
If only they knew of Curator back then!
What is Curator anyway?
It’s simple - it’s a social media aggregator or social media curator that you use to embed your social media feeds onto your website. It’s so simple that there is literally no reason why every business shouldn’t have a social media feed on their website.
If you’re going to all that effort to create a powerful social media presence, why not showcase your best work on your website?
A social media feed on your website can also drive traffic to your social media profiles and help you grow your network and visibility in social media as well.
The top features in Curator
The first thing I loved when I discovered Curator.io was how easy it is to setup, customize and integrate with your website. The time and energy this one thing alone saved me is worth its weight in gold. Cutting out the developer time and cost created a new exciting opportunity for every site I was working with.
The free version of Curator has a ton of features that you can try, so you really get a feel for the power of the tool. Better yet, it’s free forever, which is great if you don’t need all of the extra features. There are also several options to upgrade your service, and I recommend you check out Curator's pricing to find the right fit for you.
Curator also has the biggest list of supported networks that I’ve found. At the time of this writing, Curator supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and RSS. They also add new networks as often as they find them.
The customization options are outstanding. When I first started using Curator, I recalled all the time it took to find and hire a developer who could custom create something that looked good on a website. With Curator, the default already looks clean and professional and has tons of options for customizing further.
How We Use Curator
I work for a digital marketing training company, and we actually recommend Curator as a must have social media tool. We live demo the tool in our trainings, to show our students all of the amazing features and options available. We aim to inspire our students to use this tool on their own websites to build visibility and engagement in their audience.
Here are a few of our favorite examples of Curator, that we share with our students in our tool review.
The customization options in Curator are amazing and easy to implement! Within just a few minutes of using the tool, I could easily create a beautifully curated feed for my site. This site shows how they customized the feed to fit the tone of the brand.
This example shows how you can curate a feed using a specific hashtag. I love how the brand invites its users in to create content and tag them using their branded hashtag.
We love introducing this tool to our students and showing them the possibilities of what they can create. To view our tool review of Curator, check out our Digital Marketing Tools course, which is part of our all access pass.