By Justin Delos Reyes – Web Success Team

Is your company’s website up to par with the standards of today’s social media savvy audience? Here are three tips to make your website a social media hot spot.

1. Add Sharing Buttons to Your Pages
An easy way to get people to talk about your product or service, and to boost page hits, is to add sharing buttons to your website. Sharing buttons allow visitors to quickly distribute the content they find on your website to social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and social bookmarking services (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit).

The best strategy for adding sharing buttons to your website is to use the least number of buttons as possible. In other words, only add buttons your visitors are most likely to use. This will prevent buttons from cluttering your pages and make layout issues easier to manage. Two to three buttons will suffice for most company websites (with those buttons being Facebook’s “Like” button and Twitter’s “Tweet” button).

You can add a catch-all service to your website if you want to give visitors more sharing options. Examples of catch-all services are ShareThis and AddToAny, which showcase multiple buttons in a single widget. The downside to using a catch-all service is they don’t advertise a clear call-to-action to your visitors. The upside, however, is they save space on your pages and give visitors the opportunity to share your content over multiple platforms.

2. Let Customers Review and Comment on Your Products
Keep visitors engaged on your website by allowing them to review and comment on the products or services you offer. This is not to be confused with the “testimonials” page on your website where you select positive quotes to display. A “reviews” or “comments” section is a space on your website where customers and clients can freely express their insights, ask questions, and voice their concerns.

Give them an opportunity to showcase their value on your website. Allow them to feel good about helping other customers with their purchasing decisions. But don’t make them jump through fire to do it. The process should be very simple. For instance, each product page on your website should have a space that’s clearly designed for visitors to type information and start conversations with each other. Think Amazon, but on your website.

3. Integrate Your Facebook and Twitter Feeds
Is the information on your website the same as it was three months ago? If so, that’s a problem you should address (but not lose sleep over). Integrate your Facebook and/or Twitter feed to ensure fresh content is regularly displayed on your website. If your visitors congregate on other social media networks or platforms, integrate those instead.

Control Your Social-Ready Website
By making your company’s website more social, you’ll need to invest more time overseeing it. Negative reviews and comments will undoubtedly make their way onto your product pages. First-time visitors will hit the back button on their browser if they’re turned off by the content in your Facebook and Twitter feeds. Take the necessary steps to ensure your new website doesn’t backfire on you by delegating edititorial tasks among your staff or to an online marketing agency.

Take Your Website to the Next Level
How do you plan to make your company’s website more social?