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A social media friendly website

A social media friendly website

The best website is a social media friendly website. How social-media-friendly is your website? Is your website easy to share via social media?

A social media friendly website

What exactly is a social media friendly website? Social media is a collective term for online platforms where users can exchange information without or with minimal intervention of a professional editorial staff. Interaction between users is important here. 

Social media include weblogs, microblogs (Twitter), social bookmarking, video sites (YouTube), internet forums, wikis (Wikipedia), and social networks (Facebook).

A social media friendly website makes it easy to share information from the website via social media. And to enable interaction between social media users and the website.

Be active on social media with your website. Make it easy for your visitors to share your website with their supporters. Make it easy for yourself to publish new content from your website on social media. Make your social media content interesting to click through to your website. 

Your own social media

You can interact with your visitors via social media. Furthermore, you can see what's going on at any given moment, which topics are popular and why. Publish links to your own social media accounts so that your visitors can subscribe to your accounts. A social media friendly website interacts with its target group.

Interaction with your visitors

Social media is not a one-way communication. Large companies work with webcare teams that try to solve problems about their services or products. A customer complaint is quickly posted via social media. But you can show your best side by trying to solve the complaint in a positive way.

Where mincemeat is chopped, chips fall. Something goes wrong with every company. A complaint on social media without a response is a bad review. A complaint that is publicly resolved is positive advertising.

Be friendly on social media. And bring visitors to your website via a link in your social media profile.

Sharing by visitors

Unique content is important for a website that is easy to find. Unique content is also interesting to refer to. Make it easy for your visitors to share your page with their supporters.

Do it in a privacy friendly way. So don't load scripts from other sites. When loading scripts from other websites, you share the visitor's IP address with those websites. That is not privacy friendly. Furthermore, loading external scripts takes extra time at the expense of speed.

Do it in a good way: only after a click of the visitor the external website will open with a window in which you show a standard message with a link to that page on your website. The visitor can change this standard text if desired.

Self-publishing on social media

If you post new messages on your website, you can attract more visitors to the new content if you post a short message with a link to your site on social media. Plugins are available that allow you to publish your new content automatically to social media.

Integration

In addition to automatically publishing to social media, you can also embed social media on your website. Embedding can be done in several ways:

  • via an iframe - via an HTML iframe you can display content from another site in your site. You cannot change the layout of the external website that you show within your website via such an iframe. You also need to take safety into account. You have no control over the external website. And if you use HTTP Security Headers, you must explicitly allow the external site.
  • via a plugin - Plugins are available for Joomla and WordPress. They retrieve the data from such a social media channel via the API. The advantage is that you can display the data in your own website in your own design. Not all social media channels allow this.

Attractive click-through

If you share a link from your website on social media, make it attractive to click on it. You can do this by adding a title + description + picture to the message on social media. 

Many social media use so-called Open Graph Tags (OG tags). Through specific HTML meta tags in your pages on your website you communicate which title + description + image you want to show. If you include these OG Tags in your pages, social media channels will retrieve them when you place a link to your website.

Not all social media channels use the same OG Tags. The following OG Tags on your own website will make your links on social media a lot more attractive to click on: 

<!-- Essential OG Tags -->
<meta property="og:title" content="The Best Website: A social media friendly website">
<meta property="og:description" content="How social-media-friendly is your website? Is your website easy to share via social media?">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://the-best-website.com/images/thumbnail.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://the-best-website.com/is-also/a-social-media-friendly-website">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

<!-- Non-essential OG Tags, But Recommended -->
<meta property="og:site_name" content="The Best Website">
<meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="A social media friendly website">

For Joomla and WordPress there are plugins available that automatically add such OG Tags as meta tags to your HTML page. 

A social media friendly website

Is your website social media friendly?

Do you have the best website?

About this website

* according to Peter Martin

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