While in many ways your website is the core of your brand, most of your potential consumers spend most of their time browsing social media platforms. There is when they find out about the latest offers, promotions, read reviews, and look for customer support. 

Here is some data for you: there are more than 3.2 billion social media users worldwide, spending an average of 116 minutes per day on the platforms. Companies that sell their products over social media get 119% better ROI. This is why you need to invest in a good social media agency in Dubai to manage your accounts and create impactful advertising. 

This doesn’t mean you should ditch your website – a company without a website doesn’t come across as trustworthy and professional, and a web presence is essential to growing brand awareness and conduct e-commerce. In fact, social media should serve to get your business and your website more exposure, and together they should seamlessly promote your brand. 

In UAE, especially Dubai, social media users are as dedicated as in the rest of the world if not more, with their unique behavioural patterns. 

This is why the agency that does your webdesign in Dubai should connect your social media to your e-commerce website, and do it in such way that you get the most out of your social media activities. 

We recommend working with a digital agency that is experienced with web development in Dubai as well as social media marketing and social media management. 

If they are also doing your search engine optimization (SEO), as any good digital agency in Dubai should, they will know how crucial social media is to keep the search engine rankings up!

Here are our tips on how to integrate your website design with your social media:

1. Make sure your website visitors know which social media platforms you’re on

Your social media icons should be instantly visible and remain so on any page. That means placing your follow icons on header and footer of your website, keeping them as a sticky as the user scrolls down, and repeating them on your contact page. Too many companies only use one page to showcase their social media details, and most users simply never end up finding them – that is an example of poor UX from the side of your website design company.

Another tip – link the social media in such a way to the website buttons/icons that they open the social media pages in new tabs, rather than make the user leave the website.

2. Don’t be passive – use calls to action

Even better than just having visible icons on your website is to include a call to action. Have your copywriter draft a compelling invite to visitors to like your Instagram pages, follow you on Facebook or connect with you on Linkedin. 

A simple call to action can be very effective in compelling the user to behave the way you’d like on your website. Users have a better experience on websites where they receive clear guidance and don’t have to think about where to focus their attention.

3. Make your content sharable

If you have an excellent web design and quality content, it would be a shame if it went undiscovered. Make sure your website content can easily be shared on social media, thereby leading the readers to your website and increasing your traffic. 

Allow visitors to make website testimonials using Facebook accounts. If you have a blog, which you should for your SEO efforts, you should have share and like icons on every post, and same can be applied on any page of your website with interesting information – news, media room, pages with instructions, newest launches, special offers and more. 

4. Allow visitors to log in through their social media account

A great way to improve the user experience on website pages that require logging in is to enable users to do so with their Facebook, Twitter and Google accounts. It saves the hassle of filling out registration forms, and overall leads to an increase in conversion rate for user registrations. 

Not to mention, every time they log in again, the process is seamless – no forgotten passwords or usernames

5. Use social media-friendly web design

More and more, homepages are starting to feature social media feeds, blog feeds and news feeds instead of static content. This keeps your regular visitors interested and more likely to engage with your social accounts. This trend led to change in homepage layouts which now include modular panels that can flexibly feature any type variable content. 

Embed YouTube videos on your page – Pages with YouTube videos actually rank better in the Google search engine, especially if the videos have a good number of views. Not only that, videos increase visitor’s time on the page which improves the ranking and the conversion rates. 

Ideally, your website design & development agency will work with this in mind because it is much harder to implement these features on an existing website. 

6. Connect your website to social media through metadata

Many digital marketing agencies fail to communicate the importance of metadata to connecting your website to your social media channels. The data, which is called “backend data” and can be accessed through an SEO plugin, is what determines how your website is depicted on social media channels when a page gets shared. 

Using Twitter Cards or Facebook Open Graphs on a website is also a great way to manage your web presence on SM networks. Facebooks Open Graph Protocol allows the users to adjust the appearance of their URL regardless of the data that got pulled,however, Facebook requires that the users verify their domains.. Twitter Cards also uses a card validator to test the website links.

7. Engage with your visitors using quizzes, gamers and chats

A website should not feel like a flyer, a static bulk of information talking at the user. Social media platforms keep the visitor engaged by offering a lot of fun activities for them to participate in, and a professional branding agency in Dubai knows that engaging with the brand is an unparalleled way to create brand loyalty. 

Your website should emulate these techniques. Offer your users a small and fun game, or a cool quiz they can take (and share!). 

A chat is a great way to interact with your visitors in real-time, which is also more convenient for them and adds to good user experience. Just make sure someone from your team is always available to respond.

8. Add hashtags and handles to the design

Whether you use them as design elements, or subtly apply them in the right places, hashtags and handles can read like header tags. They grab attention and help you digitally promote your brand, products or initiatives while adding to a nice look and feel of the while page.

They also tell your visitors that you are engaged on social channels – hopefully, you have a great agency that does social media in Dubai to live up to this image.

9. Use notification trackers on your pages

Any experienced web design company will tell you, a good UX design is intuitive. Considering how much time your website visitors spend on their social channels, they respond to visual prompts that are similar to the ones used on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 

A pending message notification automatically piques our interest, and so when websites use notifications in their design (e.g. 6 available jobs on a career page; 3 new products etc), the user feels this is worth their attention and directed to them personally.

Conclusion

Both your website and your social media in their way serve to draw in visitors and communicate about your brand, aiming for conversions. Instead of focusing on one of these methods or treating them as two separate fields, you should integrate them as much as possible for mutual benefit – your website can promote your social media accounts, and your social media accounts should draw visitors to your website. 

Working with an agency that does both professional website design and development as well as social media in Dubai is a great way to get a good start with both. This will also benefit your SEO efforts. 

We believe that a powerful brand needs to integrate all platforms into the main brand strategy. If you feel your website and social media is lacking this connection, get in touch with a professional digital marketing agency in Dubai and discuss the best solutions.