The Two Faces Of Social Landing Pages

The advent of social media has connected us in new ways to the people, brands, and products we care about. Because we spend nearly one quarter of our time online visiting social networks, these websites can become powerful tools for global e-commerce and B2B marketing.

Although social media is an important part of every online marketer’s landing page program, it requires a unique approach and a dash of creativity to master. When you’re building a landing page for the social universe, you must first consider the type of landing page that you’re looking to deploy. The two most common types of social media landing pages are social campaign landing pages and social “hubs”. Here are some of the key differences between the two:

Social Hubs Campaign Pages Great for PPC or Banner Advertising Great for Content Marketing Contains streaming video, third party links, and micro-conversions Customer-facing

Social campaign pages are similar to standard pay-per-click (PPC) landing pages in that they’re traditionally either e-commerce or lead-gen focused, and facilitate many of the same types of conversion-oriented actions as their older cousins in search engine marketing. This means that many of the same landing page best practices from pay-per-click advertising still apply:

• Use a conversion-centric design that places the call-to-action and form fields in the spotlight.
• Keep the landing page as relevant to your ad and traffic source as possible.
• Test and optimize your page elements to improve conversion and defer micro-conversion actions (such as a ‘Like’ button) to the thank-you page.

To maximize conversion, try incorporating social proof into your campaign landing page by adding widgets that allow your visitors to see whether any of their friends have interacted with your brand, and deploy rich thank-you pages that make it easy to engage further with your company on other social sites.

A social hub. Click on the image to visit ion’s Facebook page.The next type of social landing page is a social hub. Social hubs are like terminals that allow visitors to connect online with your brand in a wide variety of ways. These pages may contain links to the other places where your company is engaged in the social sphere, such as YouTube, Facebook, your company’s official blog, or Twitter. They may also contain widgets and iFrames that display content from other sites, or even allow your visitors to post their comments or perform other actions directly on the page.

Social hubs are a great source of product and brand education and engagement. These pages provide an interface for visitors to download whitepapers, watch videos, and ask questions about your product or service.

These hubs are also a great way to turn Facebook tabs into customizable, testable, multi-purpose landing pages, and can even help to improve your brand’s SEO rank by linking out to your company’s site.

When building social hubs, keep page friction—any barriers to conversion—very low. This means offering direct downloads without requring a form submission, and “ungating” some of your popular content. In return, you’ll have visitors engaged with your brand and served with your content, providing a lot of value to your prospects and a potential long-term boost in organic traffic.

Are you testing any new types of social landing pages for your brand? Drop us a line in the comments below or tweet @ioninteractive and tell us your story!