How, by making social media buttons less prominent on your site, visitors are often more likely to respond to your offers.

We have never been huge fans of prominently displaying social media icons/links on every page of a website, especially the homepage. After all, the idea is to “pull” site visitors to your site through social media (because that is where they are already “hanging out” online), not to drive visitors that are already on your site away to your Facebook page, for instance.  

This is not to say that social media is any less useful as a content distribution platform.  We would simply recommend that you might take some time to first create a strategy for social media, one that uses an old-fashioned common sense approach to placing these social media buttons on your website.

The footer of your site can be a great place to stash these links for those who are actively seeking them.

HubSpot actually does a great job of this on its own website. If you have a close look at their homepage, the only place that you will find links to any of their social media channels is within their footer section, tucked away as a series of small text-links.

Instead of confusing their visitors with an endless array of social media buttons that would work to take visitors away from their home-base, HubSpot uses this prime homepage real estate to highlight their unique selling proposition (USP) along with a call to action (CTA) for a demo of their product (at the time of this article being published at least). 

Other options for placement of social media buttons.

We have also seen sites successfully use tiny social media buttons within their sites header (I repeat tiny). Copyblogger springs to mind as one such site, which has increasingly shrunk the size of these social buttons while simultaneously growing their customer base to over 170,000 blog subscribers.

This same tactic could be used for placing social media buttons within the footer as we have described above in the HubSpot example.

Social sharing buttons on the other hand… 

Keep in mind that “demoting” social media prominence within your website design has nothing to do with the use of social sharing buttons (Facebook “like” or “share” buttons, for example). We suggest using these types of icons “in-line” with your content if you are not doing so already.

Most popular blogging platforms, like HubSpot, offer an easy way to include these social sharing icons either before or after the text in your blog posts. Taking advantage of these tools will serve to best harness the true power of social media.

The power to aid your company in spreading your remarkable content throughout the social mediasphere and to get your website found by prospective customers.