Advantages of Adding Social Media Icons to your Website

Whether you’re building an online store or maintaining a blog, it’s pretty trendy to add a set of social media icons to your website. The most common of them are Facebook, Twitter, Multiply. Sometimes, web designers also add a Flicker icon to link an online album of products or photo samples, in the case of people displaying their skills in photography.

Facebook and Multiply icons can direct visitors to an extension the store, if the website source is the store itself. If it’s embedded on a blog, the link can redirect the visitor to the online store itself, as some small business operators have used Facebook and Multiply pages to sell their goods directly to their social networking contacts.

Meanwhile, the micro-blogging features of Twitter allow store owners to make speedy announcements to visitors who have chosen to “follow” them. Micro blogging is more effective and affective now than emailed newsletters. People want the news fast, and if the event doesn’t interest them, they don’t want to be bothered with so much text. Twitter posts can also include links to the website itself or to a blog, just in case the customer following the tweet would like to know more.

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Some websites or blogs can’t handle too many images, so if the products or services being marketed are image-dependent, this can be pretty disadvantageous. Some small business owners are forced to use blog sites because they’re either free or their domain name is popular, which helps them attract more customers. A social media icon redirecting visitors to their online albums in Flicker or a similar site will come in handy. Not everyone has a Flicker account as this community concentrates on photographers and photography enthusiasts.

However, Flicker can be viewed publicly, and it can protect the users from copyright infringement. If you’re looking for a similar social networking website to upload your images onto, make sure that it’s flash-based. This way, website visitors won’t always be able to copy and save the images unless you allow them to. Of course, you can also manually embed your images with watermarks, but that takes time and it could affect the quality of your images.

Social networking websites want people to stay connected. Their market value depends on how popular they are online. This means that most of them have plug-ins, allowing you to generate codes so you can easily attach their icon to your website. You can also adjust the sizes of the icons by hard coding them into your website’s CSS.