A web site exists to achieve goals such as generating leads, driving purchasing decisions and or establishing credibility. Within these goals, a site should be structured to realize them. Yet, too many web sites are being taken over by distractions, especially social media icons that are blaring out on the home page, taking over spots where critical content (messaging, calls to action) should be placed.
Social media sites should be driving traffic to a web site, not the other way around – at least until a web site goal has been reached. Getting visitors to your web site is a critical achievement, so then why aggressively invite visitors to suddenly leave and visit your YouTube channel, facebook page or Yelp page? Considering that visitors to your site can easily click away to millions of other choices for any fluky reason, once they are in your domain, you should keep them there to achieve a goal by providing clean and well thought navigation and interface design.
For most businesses, especially ecommerce sites and service businesses, you are better of putting social network icons (visit us on facebook, follow on us twitter) on the bottom. However, share buttons, a retweet button and facebook like button can be prominently placed on pages.
Most social media sites also enable you to put code snippets on your web pages, where you can provide relevant content without having visitors click away to those sites, where they can be further distracted.
Tags: Social Media