Social media websites – think Facebook and Twitter – make up a large and growing part of today’s online landscape.  Hundreds of millions of people worldwide already use social media platforms regularly to communicate with friends and family, and more and more users are joining them daily. From a business perspective, this is a huge audience of potential customers that can be reached fairly cheaply and easily, and forward-thinking companies have enthusiastically jumped into the social media game.

Creating a compelling Facebook page for your company and spreading its latest news via Twitter are fast becoming essential Internet marketing practices. To make the most of social media, however, a business should make sure that visitors to its website can easily tell their online friends about the great content they find there. That’s why smart companies are adding social share buttons to their sites.

You already know what a social share button is, even if you’ve never heard the term before. Just think of the Facebook “Like” button, whose “thumbs-up” illustration has quickly achieved the status of a cultural icon. Many visitors who enjoy your website will unconsciously scan the screen for the Like button so that they can quickly share what they’ve found with their online friends. If you haven’t bothered to add the button, you may be continually missing out on opportunities for free promotion.

Social media sharing is a form of word-of-mouth advertising, but one that can propagate at a speed many times faster than actual word-of-mouth ever could. Social media messages can quickly spread to an exponentially growing audience, because it’s so easy for each recipient of a message to quickly pass it along in turn to essentially as many people as her or she wants to.  And it happens with less effort than it would take to physically whisper the information into just one friend’s ear.

It’s well worth the effort to make sure that these important social share buttons find a prominent place on your organizations’ webpage:

• Facebook Like button – The Like button is perhaps the quickest way for Facebook users to recommend your website or a specific piece of content on it, such as a blog post or an embedded video. Each user’s “Likes” appear on his or her Facebook wall and may show up in friends’ Facebook news feeds.
• Facebook Share button – Visitors to your website who click this button are given a choice of several ways to share links to your content – by sending a link in a private message to a friend, or by posting the link on their personal walls, on the walls of any other Facebook pages they administer, on specific friends’ walls or on the walls of Facebook groups they belong to.  The person sharing the link can also send a personal comment along with it.
• Tweet button – Visitors who click the Tweet button on your webpage will put a link to your site in their Twitter feed along with any comment they wish to add, up to Twitter’s 140-character limit. Their Twitter followers can not only check out your website, they can also “re-tweet” the link on to their followers.
• Google +1 button – The +1 button is Google’s answer to the Facebook Like button.  People who “+1” your site will be passing on a link to it to other Google+ users in one or more of their social circles. Because Google dominates Internet search and can factor +1 information into its search results, the influence of +1 is expected to increase rapidly. Google search results will begin showing how many users have recommended a particular item by listing the number of +1’s it has garnered. Even more significant from an SEO perspective, receiving +1’s may drive a website higher in search rankings. Rankings may even be personalized, so that a searcher may see a website higher up in the search results if friends in his or her Google social circles have visited it and clicked its +1 button.

The four social share buttons just discussed are the ones that currently have the most potential to spread the word about your business, but there are others. Buttons for Digg, StumpleUpon and Tumblr can enable easy sharing to those sites, which are smaller but still have users numbering in the millions.  CyberMark International can assist your business with a social media marketing plan, including adding social share buttons to your website. Browse the CyberMark website to see our full range of award-winning Internet marketing services.  For a free consultation or website evaluation, call CyberMark at 623-889-3380.