Power Up Your Platform

Integrating Social into Your Website

Most of my focus in this book has been on how to optimize your presence on
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks. Building a thriving
online community requires investment in your page and development of tabs,
posts, videos, and more—a seemingly endless stream of content. All that activity
pays off in leads, new customers, and increased customer loyalty. But it can be
unsettling to invest so many content assets in a platform you don’t own or fully
control.
Now, you can add social interactivity to something you do control—your own
website. You can hook your website into the social graph—and benefit your
business in three ways:

1..You’ll improve customer engagement and conversion rate on your
website, thanks to the social proof of friends who bought or
recommended certain items

2..You’ll generate positive word of mouth when your customer activity is
posted to the Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds

3..You’ll gain valuable data on the likes, interests, education, jobs,
friends, and countless other data points of your customers—data that
you’d never see were it not for Facebook integration

Let’s start with the easiest ways to connect your web properties with the social
media universe and then work our way through increasingly ambitious and
powerful approaches.