How Prominent Social Media Links Are Killing Your Conversions

social-media-links-on-website
Ryan Irving

Social media platforms, whichever one you choose (wait, what am I saying, we all know recruiters love LinkedIn), can be great when utilised properly.

As web designers, we often get asked to ensure our client’s social media profiles are linked to from the top of every page on their new website.

I always have the same response to this which I explain in this video (transcription below)…

Having links to the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or whatever it may be at the top of your website page like in the example above is a very common layout.

You can see the social media links in red and the problem with this is that it’s a distraction.

Someone might come to your website, have a look around at your content, and think, “Hm, let’s see what kind of content they’re posting on LinkedIn,” for example.

What happens when someone clicks a link to a social media platform

Now, at the very basics, these links should at least open up in a new window. If the link is opening up in the same window that replaces your website, please fix that immediately! Nothing drives me madder than when I see links to external websites replacing your website. That’s just terrible.

We need to keep people on your recruitment company website to ultimately convert them into a potential client or candidate.

Once somebody has opened up a link, hopefully in a new tab or a new window to LinkedIn, they’re then going to have a look around at your LinkedIn content. Obviously, that’s where the link is going to take them.

But then let’s say together they go on there and they have some notifications of a new message from a colleague/contact, or a prospect or they wanna check out their own LinkedIn. They want to see what activities are going on with their connections. They’re now off into a journey of looking around on LinkedIn and they’ve forgotten all about who you are.

This is why we don’t want to be actively promoting sending people away from our websites onto the likes of social media.

How to fix it

We still want to link to our social media channels because often people might visit your website purely to find your LinkedIn page, for example, that might be the objective of visiting your website and we don’t want to harm that. We don’t want to stop people from achieving what they want to achieve on your website.

We still need to link to these places, but what you can do is either have the links to your social channels at the bottom of every page instead of the top. That’s quite common, or even better still, only link to them from your ‘contact us’ page, for example.

On your contact us page you might have a form, address of your agency, or your various branches, you have your telephone numbers and email addresses. There’s no problem with having links to your social media there because those are the places people are going to look.

So, link to your social media channels, yes. But we don’t actively try and encourage people to visit our social channels because we know that we’re likely to lose them, and they’re not going to come back. We are missing opportunities to convert.