A successful website has several “must-have” elements, and social media icon is just one of them. Social media icons have quickly become normal parts of a website and even mandatory in many cases. With the development of web design and social media integration strategies, you cannot just slap social media links on your website and call it a day. Make sure to incorporate social media icons as proper web elements.
Why Adding Social Media Icons as Web Element?
Regardless of your goal in running a website, inserting social media icons as notable web elements will give you advantages. Some good reasons to incorporate social media icons on your website include:
Creating Widespread Customer Networks
Social media are tools for sharing and connection. By adding your social media icons to your website, you make sure that customers can follow and share your posts or links. Shareable content and links work well in the digital era, especially with the rising numbers of mobile device and social media users.
Social media connections also allow customers to recommend your company, products, or services to others. The support of algorithms and AI will improve the exposure of your business to social media users with related interests. This will grow your social media followers, which will improve customer networks and business exposure.
Creating Better Connection with Customers
Modern customers love companies that maintain good communication with them. As a business owner, you can do that by responding quickly to their inquiries or comments, making social media polls, and creating relevant posts that appeal to the demographics of your followers. Facilitate all these by adding social media icons to your website.
Providing Direct Contacts and Emergency Responses
Social media provide direct communication lines between companies and customers. By adding social media icons, prospective customers and website visitors can contact your business directly. Social media users will appreciate that they can send direct messages or comments through social media instead of the website contact form or other less direct methods.
Adding Credibility Factor to the Website
The popularity of social media has turned them into an indicator of credibility. Most social media users will trust a business website more if they can visit the connected social media accounts. Having social media icons create a look of transparency because you convince visitors that you are open to their scrutiny.
Supporting Branding Efforts
Social media are important branding tools in the digital era. They allow business owners to have their information shared widely and discussed by the public. Social media also creates a better connection to the market demographics, making it easier for your products or services to get recognition.
Where to Insert Social Media Icons
Think about the best placements before adding social media icons to your website!
Remember, a website offers not only information but also experience. Placing too many icons and buttons on the webpage can confuse visitors and make your social media strategy less effective. Choose only the most active social media icons to display on your website, which will encourage visitors to share (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are usually the most popular).
Have you done choosing the most popular icons to display? Here are several placement recommendations.
Under the Header/Hero Image
This is the most obvious location to place social media icons. Visitors will immediately see them, especially if you place the icons as parts of the header or hero image. You can modify the icons to match the color palette and style of your header or hero image.
Top of the Content
If your website has individual pages, you can place social media icons on top of the content on each page. This placement will make visitors immediately notice them. The same thing applies to individual blog pages. This is because many website readers now tend to share interesting links even before reading the whole content.
Left Side of the Page
The left side of the page is another common placement for social media icons. It follows the natural eye movements when website visitors read the content. Therefore, spotting the social media includes will be easier to notice.
Webpage Footer
Many websites place social media icons on the footer. This is a natural alternative for general placements if you do not want to “ruin” the composition of your header. This placement is so common that website visitors often scroll to the footer specifically to find social media icons they can follow.
Floating Bar
Want to make your website look more modern while reducing clutter on the page? Use a floating bar to place social media icons. This floating bar will not “disappear” when you scroll the page up and down, and it will always appear in the line of sight. The location will “remind” visitors to click and share, and you do not need to clutter your webpage with links and images.
Avoid placing social media icons on pages that encourage conversions, such as purchase, rent, order, or book pages. Since social media icons encourage actions, they will take the focus away from conversion activities, which will affect income.
Best Ways to Insert Social Media Icons
Social media icons come in various styles, shapes, and colors. Since every social media has distinctive characteristics, you must choose the best visual representations for the icons to display. Here are several recommendations based on the social media types.
- Always use Facebook blue and white combination to make it recognizable. You can also use the inverted version of white and blue.
- Make sure the Facebook logo is placed in a circle, a rounded edge square, or a sharp edge square.
- If there are color limitations, use black and white or grey and white combinations.
- Avoid changing the “f” in Facebook (such as turning it into a capital letter), skewing the proportion, or animating it.
- Make sure the Facebook icon has the same size as other icons.
- Place the Facebook logo next to Messenger if your business also uses this message service.
- Use the default light blue and white combination for the Twitter icon or the inverted white-light blue one.
- Use the default black and white or grey and white versions.
- If you use background shape, use the default circle, round edge square, or sharp edge square.
- Do not modify or change the Twitter bird image. This means not changing the orientation, shape, proportion, and default color.
- Make sure the icon image is at least 32 pixels wide.
- The only Instagram icon you can use is the one sourced from the brand site.
- Display Instagram icon without any container.
- Using the original Instagram icon color, or a black-and-white one is a colored version is impossible.
- You can use other solid colors for the Instagram icon (such as matching the website’s color palette) but never alter the other parts of the icon.
- If you use the Instagram glyph icon, make sure the space on all sides is clear.
YouTube
- Make sure to clear the space around the icon, at least half the width of the YouTube icon.
- Use the default red and white as the icon color. If it is not possible, use black and white.
- Avoid any alterations to the icon, including the shape and the form.
- Never tilt or change the orientation of the icon.
- The minimum resolution should be around 24dp to ensure visibility.
Snapchat
- The Snapchat ghost icon should only appear in white with black lining.
- Avoid using the yellow background if you use the Snapchat icon on your social media page. Snapchat only uses it for the app’s mobile icon on the device screen.
- The icon width must be at least 18 p to ensure visibility.
- Make sure the ghost icon link back to your business’ Snapchat account.
- Always use the Pinterest “P” as per the original design, no alteration.
- Use the default red and white colors for the icon. If it is not possible, use a black and white or near-black monochromatic icon.
- Never use phrases like “Trending on Pinterest” or “Trending Pins” as the CTA remark.
- If you need a CTA, we recommend these phrases for Pinterest: “Find us on Pinterest”, “Popular on Pinterest”, “Follow us on Pinterest”, or “Get inspired on Pinterest.”
To play safe, you can find default social media icon images from the resource pages of all their respective websites. Otherwise, you can keep the default shape and form even when you need to alter the background color a little bit.
Design Ideas for Interesting Icons
You can invite more website visitors to click on social media icons if you use interesting designs for them. You cannot change the default shapes, forms, and orientations. However, you can still get creative in the artistic style of the icons without altering their important design elements.
For example, instead of regular flat icons, why don’t you use 3D icons? They look interesting, and you can keep the default looks and colors of the social media icons. You can also make them look like a set of pins, which add a modern touch to your website.
Another way to create attractive social media icons is using cartoon style. You can keep the default colors, shapes, and forms of the icons, but the slightly playful style will draw attention. You can also add effects to the icons, such as making them look like a set of stamps, digital arts, or paintings.
Finally, you can create unique social media icons by playing with the space outside their backgrounds. For example, you keep the icons in their default forms and colors, but add artistic paint banners next to them with corresponding colors, using the banners as the spaces for CTA sentences.
Tips to Make Visitors Click on Your Icons
Designing good social media icons is not enough. You must make sure that visitors actually click on them and get the experiences you intend to. Here are some tips to make your social media icons clickable.
Keep Them Close to Content
If you want people to share your content, make it easier for them. Keep the social media icons close to the content (or products and catalogs). Even if they are not next to the content, the icons should still be easy to find right after the visitors digest the content. This also applies to placing social media icons close to your web header or name.
Make the Icon Locations Exclusive
Never mix the social media icons with other actionable buttons. For example, putting them close to conversion links such as “Buy”, “Shop”, or “Add to Cart” will redirect the web visitors and reduce the possibility of them clicking.
Keep the Amounts of the Icons Minimum
Adding too many social media icons will clutter the website and make your visitors overwhelmed. Choose four to five social media accounts to be turned into icons, and no more than that. The numbers keep the visitors from being overwhelmed with choices while still giving options for those using multiple social media.
How to know which social media icons to display? Use analytics to see the most interactions, shares, and backlink traffic between your social media accounts. Pick the ones that invite the most activities, like those you display as icons.
Use CTA Sentences
CTA sentences can increase the probability of people clicking on your social media icons. They do not need to be long or flowery, just enough to make visitors notice the presence of these icons. The CTA can be “Share this”, “Follow us”, “Our socials…”, and many more. You can also tweak the CTA a little bit using phrases such as “Let’s tell everyone”, “Love this story? Please share”, and many more.
Use Professional Designers or Sources
If you want to use modified social media icons, make sure to order from professional designers or websites. They usually understand the basics of social media icons and make sure that their designs will not stray from icon requirements.
Adding social media icons to a website provides a lot of advantages, especially for business owners. Use this guide to create the best social media icons and place them in the right spots. Make your website element more attractive and popular by adding social media icons the right way.
