Improve engagement by designing for social

Social media has quickly become a prominent force in the world of digital marketing. Getting Facebook likes, subscriptions and retweets is marketing gold dust in the current climate. It’s easy to get wrapped up in perfecting your Twitter presence or Facebook content without taking the time to implement strategies and features which will bring users from outside social media into it.

There are a few tricks you can try out during the web design process to encourage shares, following and improve overall social engagement.

Web Shui your share buttons

Share buttons are those little squares on webpages with logos from various social media platforms on them. Click on them and you’ll be taken to the specific social media site and encouraged to “share” the content from their website on your profile.

So what’s the best approach to share buttons? Good share buttons genuinely increase social engagement without annoying a user. The key is to strike a balance between content and promotion – they shouldn’t be overly pushy but they should be easy to find.

Here are a few basic guidelines when approaching the share button:

Placing: If your page has a long blog post or article it’s good to put a share button at the bottom of the page. It’s often a good idea to complement this with other share buttons. A floating widget is a good way to keep share buttons visible at all time without being intrusive.

Size: A share button isn’t a call-to-action button so bigger is not better. If you want to get your share buttons to stand out surround them with lots of clean, white space.

How many buttons? Don’t overload your users with too many share buttons. If you want to give them lots of options then a catchall service, like the one pictured above will pop up a tidy interface which a user can interact with through their own choice. A potential downside is that you’ll lose the impact of the standalone Facebook or Twitter icons as a call to action.

A few tricks

A share button can be more than just a stagnant button your webpage. OkCupid has integrated a clever design feature which encourages social engagement without being pushy. When you scroll down to the end of a blog post a prompt scrolls down at the top of the screen asking if you want to share the piece:

Why does it work? Because it offers further interaction for the user at the exact time they would be considering sharing the post.

So the key to improving social engagement via web design is thinking of subtle ways to gently encourage likes and shares via clever placement and neat tools. Remember, you need to do this without bombarding a user with pestering requests to share.

View All Blog Posts →