How Social Media Aggregators Can Increase Engagement?

While many people see social media activity as separate from your site rankings, everyone knows this is not the whole truth. Sure, social media links are not the same as regular backlinks, but you can use these backlinks on social media to gain more traffic. You can use social media feed to expand your reach, boost your brand ranking, and do much more.

So, can you use social media to boost your website experience? Can you use it to increase engagement?

To increase your users’ engagement, you need to take a step back and try to imagine what these engagements look like. Chances are that these take place through widgets, small interactive elements that you can embed on your website or social media platforms. So, does it make sense that you can significantly improve your engagement rates by improving these widgets? Of course, it does. Here’s what you need to know about it!

9 Steps on How Social Media Aggregators Can Increase Engagement?

1. The Role and Significance of Social Media Aggregators

Many users have discovered your website through social media, which means that your social media’s current status makes a difference to them. So, what’s the significance of these widgets to your users and developer team? Actually, there are a couple of points worth taking into account here.

●    Real-time updates: Let’s say that your audience is following your website but are also active members of your social media community. This way, they’ll be notified every time there’s a new update on your social media, which will help you bounce traffic from your social media platforms to your site and vice-versa. It strengthens their brand loyalty quite drastically.

●    Sharing content: Sometimes, people are just lazy. If they see that it takes too much effort to share a piece of content (from your site), they just might give up. Sure, all it takes for them is to copy your URL and paste it somewhere else, but if you give them an easier way, they might pounce on the opportunity. This step is essential for your backlink management efforts.

●    Social proof: Most people are natural followers. They want to see what others think of you to form opinions. It is why social media aggregators that display relevant metrics (even if they’re just vanity metrics) can sometimes be persuasive.

●    User interaction: You don’t want your users to go back and forth from your site to the social media profile, etc. Ideally, they should be able to do it all in one place.

In other words, social media aggregation tools can transform how users interact with your brand digitally.

2. Understanding User Engagement

To balance user engagement and use social media aggregators to improve it, you must first understand the factors that affect it, to start with. For instance:

●    Content relevance: If the content is irrelevant to the audience, there’s not much you can do to increase engagement. Sure, you can try with a witty headline and hope that people will click out of curiosity, but it’s always better to improve your targeting and pick something with a focus keyword with a decent search.

●    Content quality: Another thing you need to remember is the quality of content. If the content in question is hard to digest, many people will quit rather soon. So, you need to make sure that the format is suitable. If it’s in the written form, you must make it skimmable. Most people will first skim through the text and then read it.

●    Mobile responsiveness: This is a major challenge since it’s easy to make a decent social media layout for your pages. Incorporating social media aggregators to be clickable on smaller screens is not easy. Fortunately, it’s not impossible either, and the reward for achieving this goal is more than worth it.

●    Simple navigation: People need to understand where they’re going next and how to get back in as few steps as possible. To achieve this, you need to think about your site’s human and crawler audiences. It means that navigation and architecture need to be improved hand-in-hand.

Overall, you need to give people a reason to want to engage with your brand. Where there’s enough motivation, there’s always a way.

3. Best Practices for Integration of Social Media Aggregators

When it comes to actually integrating these widgets, you need to be selective and careful. You’ll be surprised (unpleasantly) to find out just how easy it is to overdo it. With that in mind, here are a few tips to help you.

●    Prioritize: There are too many social media platforms, and you don’t need all of them. Getting too many will create a paradox of choice, slow down your site (too many HTTP requests), and ruin the page’s aesthetics. Overall, research your target demographic and see which platforms they prefer.

●    Quality over quantity: Ideally, you want to pick a few social media aggregators that will give you the optimal engagement. It is what efficiency looks like. As we’ve already said, you don’t want to draw too heavily on your site’s resources. You also don’t want the less popular widgets to draw the attention of the most popular ones.

●    Go for social proof: People want to research but are sometimes too lazy. For many of them, just outright giving up is simpler than actually researching. Therefore, by presenting them with social proof (generated on social media), you’ll have a much easier job of increasing engagement.

●    Make sure all the labels are clear: Just because it’s obvious to you what some buttons mean doesn’t mean everyone will have the same clarity in these situations. Ensure that every interactive element is clearly labelled for people to know what they’re clicking on.

Ultimately, by sticking to just these four rules, you’ll get what you’re looking for without facing the majority of downsides.

4. Leveraging Social Media Aggregators to Display Social Proof

As mentioned, people don’t want to do the independent research. The majority of people don’t even know how to do it. Instead, they want to look up what other people think. Just imagine the last time you decided to buy from an internet page. Did you look for the comments and follower count? Of course you did. However, what if you didn’t have to leave the page for this?

●    Follower count: The first thing you need to do is display the follower count on your site. It gives your site the legitimacy it needs. It may also drive more traffic to your social media page since people sometimes want to confirm the authenticity.

●    User reviews: Another thing to understand is that many people won’t write full reviews. However, they will confirm in the inbox or write comments on your site. You can use this UGC to grant more legitimacy to your website. Featured user content also gives people one more reason to create user content. It’s a self-feeding loop that your brand can benefit from. You shouldn’t just stop with social media reviews, Google reviews should be embedded, as well.

●    Influencer endorsement: Every reputable business displays many brands they collaborate with at the bottom of their homepage. Well, you could actually add influencers to this list. After all, in 2023, personal brands of influencers are just as trustworthy.

●    Social media feed: If you have an active social media profile, you can include a social media feed on your landing page. This way, you’re making it more dynamic and giving people another reason to stick around.

You can easily boost your brand’s standing and reputation by leveraging some of these widgets.

5. Encouraging User Interaction Through Widgets

Your site’s visitors will be tempted to engage with your pages if you give them a stronger reason to do so. Widgets are usually a convenient way to do something that they could have done manually, as well.

Polls and surveys: Social media surveys are a huge part of your marketing analytics. Why not maximize your audience by allowing people visiting your site to participate? Overall, maximizing your survey or poll participation is always a positive thing, and this way, you’re making it hard to miss.

●    Social media contests: Social media contests are the key to many successful social media strategies, and with the help of the right widget, you can easily display the contest entry on your site. This way, you’re making a crossover between the site and the social media profile since you’re giving people a good enough reason to check out both.

●    Social sharing prompts: If you’re creating sharable content with widgets, you’ll give people an easy way to share. To get the most out of it, you must first delve deeper into the psychology of – why people share things. It will help you make this widget even more attractive.

●    Comment section: People want to leave comments but sometimes don’t want to leave the page to do so. This way, you can give them an easy way out.

●    Virtual event: Some people stream live on social media, so why not use their site as a secondary platform? This way, you maximize your audience quite effectively.

In other words, widgets are there to give people an easy way out. It’s for those who wouldn’t bother to go to the right section manually but will see the widget and think: “Why not?”

6. Easier Sharing and Following to Expand Your Reach

One of the key ideas that people associate social media marketing with is reach. Adding a few widgets will make it easier for your audience to amplify your reach.

●    Share buttons on content: This is the bare minimum, even if you’re not into adding widgets. Instead of having to copy article URLs, you’ll be able to just click a single button and share all your content.

●    Quote highlighting: Sometimes, you don’t need to share an entire article. Giving your audience a chance just to highlight and share a quote. It boosts your brand awareness and expands your reach. By tracing back to the source, they’ll find you easier.

●    Floating share bar: This is the most convenient way to implement a share button since the bar will follow the screen as the user scrolls down. If they decide to share later, they won’t have to go back to the top of the page or refresh it. It’s great for those who want to check the content before choosing whether to share.  

●    One-click sharing: Impulse sharing works in your favour. You want people who encounter your content to be able to just click, share, and forget about it. For them, it minimizes the necessary effort, and for you, it exponentially expands the reach. The easier it gets, the more reach you’ll get; it’s that simple.

The last thing you need to remember is that while sharing is always a possibility, by making it easier and accessible, you only stand to gain more reach.

7. Generating More UGC

People are consuming more content than ever before, your audience included. It is why you’ll always be struggling to find a new content source. However, what if, aside from buying from you and sharing your content, your audience could also create some of this content? It is what UGC is all about. Here’s how all of this is supposed to work.

●    Display user posts: Instead of featuring some user posts, you can have a widget constantly displaying them. This way, you communicate to your audience that if they do well enough, you’ll have them featured in this prominent segment.

●    Hosting photo contests: Remember that not all of this content has to be written. This way, you’re getting access to potentially premium-quality content without having to resort to stock images.

●    Contests and rewards: You can even announce this as a contest and feature only the best posts and pieces. This way, you’re incentivizing your audience to put in an extra effort. For you, this means an abundance of premium content.

●    Start a UGC campaign: You can run an active UGC campaign and use social media aggregators to promote it simultaneously on your site and social media.

●    Display a hashtag: Sometimes, people will want to know where and how to find more similar content. Why not make this easier and earn yourself a favour in their eyes? It’s a low-effort, high-reward scenario either way.

Overall, a social media platform is filled with UGC. With the use of widgets and actively promoting this approach, you’ll just make it easier to harvest and promote this content.

8. Analyzing the Impact of Social Media Aggregators on Engagement

Once you incorporate these widgets, you might see an uptick in engagement, but you might still be unsure of the real ROI. It is why you need to do some analysis and testing. Here are a few things you should do to make a difference. 

●    Monitor engagement: Chances are that you won’t have too much previous data to compare, but you can always start with record-keeping and make the progression comparison. The engagement should be higher immediately, but the real numbers might take a while to kick in.

●    Segmentation: You can also compare the audience that interacts with the widgets to the audience that outright ignores them. It will give you a clearer idea of the difference that you’ve made.

●    Time spent on site: Does the engagement correlate with a user’s time on site? A user that engages usually has a longer duration of stay. How transferable is this?

●    Heatmaps: One of the best ways to visualize the intensity/success of these interactions is to use a heatmap. This way, you’ll get a much better idea of what you’re dealing with.

You shouldn’t just guess and hope that you’re doing better. You need to know this and be able to show through numbers.

9. Challenges and Concerns

Sure, not all is sunshine and roses with this effort, either. You’ll have to overcome some challenges or consider them before proceeding.

●    Page load speed: The more widgets you add, the longer it will take for the page to load. Now, if you push it too far, you may end up hurting your bottom line far more than any increased engagement from widgets will make up for.

●    Mobile-friendliness: As mentioned, many widgets are designed with desktop users in mind. Take this into consideration when integrating widgets.

●    Privacy and data collection: Some widgets collect user data, which raises privacy concerns. It also means it will be easier to keep up with all the compliances.

●    Visual distraction: We’ve already mentioned a paradox of choice. Well, this way, you get more visual elements. In practice, this may distract some of your users from the rest of the layout, which is a legitimate concern.

●    Negative comments: When displaying comments, you automatically assume they will all be positive. What if you automate this (as you should), and a negative comment/rating comes up on display? It’s a concern worth addressing.

In the end, you should never decide without considering the downsides as well as the advantages.

Wrap up

Ultimately, social media widgets are amazing tools, and as long as you understand how to use them and when to use them, you should be able to leverage them to your advantage. One of the things they can do for your site is increase engagement, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of all the amazing possibilities.