How to Display Call to Actions + Social Media Buttons

In this webinar hosted by Convert Academy, we have Carlos Del Rio, the formal Director of Conversion Analysis and Data Strategy at Unbounce, covers several topics on how you can create awesome landing pages and the various factors you need to consider. You can watch Del Rio’s full webinar here. Carlos Del Rio is the co-author of User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want and A Strategic Framework for Emerging Media. He believes that proper use of traffic analysis and breaking down barriers between web-involved departments is fundamental for businesses to succeed in a web driven economy.

We often have issues on where to include elements like images, videos, and social buttons on our landing page. Del Rio pointed out an issue that many tend to get wrong: Social Buttons. The question is, where do you normally include your social conversations – is it before or after a particular call to action?

Proper Placement

If you answered ‘after’ then you are on the right track. It is advisable to:

[Tweet “Have your social media buttons located after a call to action”]

This increases the chance a visitor will take the call to action before clicking any of your social buttons. This is a subject that has cropped up in many of our webinars before, and one even likened it to asking someone to marry you before going out on the first date.

You need to capture first their attention before you start asking them to like or follow you. When you include your social buttons (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc) on the landing page before an action has been taken, visitors may as well ignore them and divert their attention to the pictures of their loved ones on the social networks or talk to friends on Twitter. Experience has shown that only engaged persons are going to feel harassed into sharing your pages.

You need to put it all together for it to come out naturally so that the visitors will first accomplish call to actions such as filling in a form, providing their email address, clicking the download button and so on. Contrary to popular opinion, be careful with this kind of community building -or what Unbounce likes to call: host engagement in our actions. Make it happen after the action, and never before.

Tips for Displaying Social Media Buttons

In Brad’s post, How To Display Social Media Buttons, he shared 6 tips for displaying social buttons. These include:

1. Display buttons for social media where you have an active presence
2. Make them reasonably large using STANDARD images and block them together
3. Place your block of buttons in the header of every template, or
4. Place it in the footer
5. Let visitors know that these buttons are for joining your community, not for sharing your content
6. Test your buttons

The fourth tip somewhat justifies what Del Rio discussed regarding the relationship of call to actions and social buttons. This ensures you that your visitors will most likely look at your call to actions first and your social buttons second. In Brad’s post, he also shared this important aspect of displaying social media buttons:

Effective display of social media buttons on your blog and website becomes more critical every day – Brad Shorr

Note: social buttons are considered to be secondary call to actions at most. These buttons acts only as a backup if the visitor does not want to entirely commit to your primary call to action.

Customer’s POV

It’s good practice to take things from the customer’s point of view, and not only your own. You need to ask yourself ‘What is the major need you are fulfilling to those who are visiting your website?’. You could start by thinking of it as the benefits you are going to give them specifically, and not just the benefits of the service or product you are offering. In other words, the benefits the visitors are going to get by committing to you, rather than somebody else. If you want to know more about this, you can check out the full webinar here.