The Importance of Social Media in Web Designing and development


Since 2011 social media has been growing by leaps and bounds and recent research shows that more than 46% people worldwide access
social media platforms on a daily basis. In the US more than two-thirds of the adult population uses social media such as Google+,
My Space, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Clearly social media is no longer a plaything thing of the younger generation. On the
contrary, it has become something that each and every person globally has grown to love and enjoy. Because of its pervasiveness,
it is more important than ever to establish a presence for your business or company on these platforms, but even more important is
integrating the available social tools into your website during the design. To find out more on the importance of social media in
web design, read on.
The first benefit that you will see is social sharing of your message. This enables users to share content on your site or a visit
to your business with their friends on various social platforms. This, needless to say, leads to an increase in the amount of
traffic that your site will receive and can help push you higher in the search engines results. This is particularly important
when it comes to the Google search engine. When it first launched its social platform, Google+, in June 2011, Google picked up 10
million users in its first two weeks and 25 million users in just 4 weeks. In just over a month, Google+ had gained just as many
users as Facebook had gained in a period of three years. With these figures, incorporating a Google+ button during your website design
is an absolute must. An example of social sharing is seen in online stores where social sharing buttons are available on the
product pages.
However, instead of simply providing visitors with the ability to share your content, give them the ability to leave a comment
about your content that they are sharing. This can exponentially increase the value of social sharing for your business. The
comment could be a question on your product or simply an endorsement. This feature has the ability to grow your word of mouth
referrals very fast as the comments are reposted on social platforms, along with a link to the story or product. Replies from
others on social media can also be visible on your website as the pages are synched. Allowing user comments has the possibility of
getting you bad publicity if you provide poor service. However, when using social media platform comment boxes, the quality of the
individual comments will generally increases as individuals are no longer anonymous.
Today more than a billion internet users are on social media. This means that they all have social media accounts, and in many
cases an individual will have multiple accounts since many social media networks allow different types of user interactions. Using
the new technology that is available, you can enable your visitors to log into your site using their social platform accounts.
Recent research showed that 66% of internet users prefer social login to the traditional username/password login method.
Integrating this into your web design means that you receive considerably more visitors than other sites as it will eliminate the
need for visitors to remember yet another username and password. In addition, it will offer you a chance to collect valuable data
from their social profile which can help you improve your personalization and get to know your audience better.
Given that search engines are beginning to look at your social media presence to determine the importance of your web content,
integrating social media into your web design can do wonders.