Social Media Widgets Can Hurt User Engagement and Sales

When sites like Facebook or Twitter go down or see a spike in user activity, social integration meant to increase user engagement can actually hurt page load times and conversion rates

 

When Facebook went down completely for half an hour in mid-June, the social media giant’s problems rippled through the Internet. With such a wide web footprint through embedded widgets, sharing buttons and comment platforms, the outage dragged down the performance and speed of other websites using the Facebook API. In some cases, pages took more than 30 seconds to load completely.

And it’s not just major social media outages that can hurt website performance. Any time Twitter explodes with activity because of a major news story or event, every website that integrates the site’s content or functionality can get dragged down and suffer from slow load times. Even just one social media icon on a website can become a burden when the servers of a social media site get overloaded.

Adding social media tools to a retail website can be an effective way to interact with visitors, but there’s a hidden cost to this kind of customer engagement. According to the Aberdeen Group, even just a one-second delay in site response time can reduce conversion rates by 7 percent. So when widespread social media outages cause delays of tens of seconds, potential customers get frustrated and leave a website in droves without making a purchase.

For retailers that want to keep customers engaged with their brand’s page, content and products through social integration, this poses a challenging dilemma. While a brand’s marketing team wants to add rich content to make a website more interactive, the IT department often recommends keeping the site free of third-party widgets that can hurt performance. This ongoing battle often leads to a tug of war with no apparent solution.

Getting marketing and IT on the same page

Marketers want engagement and high conversion rates, but IT wants a high-functioning website that meets technical specifications. These goals don’t usually align when it comes to social media integration.

Unfortunately, the prevailing advice for website optimization often centers on cutting down on the kinds of site assets that marketing teams rely on most to push their brands ahead. That includes removing complicated snippets of code (i.e. JavaScript) and dynamic content, limiting multimedia content, and shrinking images. As a result, a retailer’s website can become static and boring.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. By following a few best practices, retailers can add social media bells and whistles to their websites without affecting site performance and speed. Here are four ways retailers can get marketing and IT on the same page.

Think about your audience:

Do your customers engage on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest? Are they actually interacting with each widget on your site? Most likely, your shoppers favor one platform over the other. Do the research and eliminate social widgets that are not effective for your brand and customers. By determining how the widgets will affect the user experience, retailers can make better decisions about whether and where to place them on a page.

Consolidate social tools:

Solutions like Shareaholic and Add This, which only rely on one JavaScript call for all social media sites, can provide a starting point for minimizing the disruption that can be caused by integrating with multiple third-party sites. While these tools aren’t immune to performance problems, bundling all the social media sites into one piece of code can help avoid a worst-case scenario.

Follow smart coding guidelines:

Social plug-ins are notoriously unreliable, so it’s best to make sure they load asynchronously – that is, independently of anything else on your page. By separating the execution of your page’s code from the scripts that call third-party websites, you can prevent an outage or heavy user activity from bringing down your site’s performance. It’s an imperfect solution because not all applications support asynchronous loading, but it’s the next step in the right direction.

Implement application sequencing:

A new approach to optimizing websites for better user engagement, application sequencing works by using contextual information about a site visitor – such as device type, connection speed and location – to determine the order and timing of displaying page elements. By identifying the most important elements that should be delivered first, retailers can control exactly when social media widgets get displayed – for example, after a predetermined delay period, when the page load is complete or in response to user actions such as scrolling. This granular control requires no additional page coding; it looks for a page’s existing scripts on the front end and then follows a set of rules to determine when to execute them. Shoe merchant Clarks realized a 13 percent increase in conversion rates using application sequencing as near-instant page rendering kept customers on the website, while social media widgets displayed last.

Social media is a must for the modern retailer, but the marketing benefits of third-party widgets have to be balanced with the IT considerations related to performance and security. By following the steps outlined above, retailers don’t have to compromise user engagement or site speed.

Contributed by Ari Weil, the VP of Products at Yottaa, a cloud-based acceleration platform that drives user engagement to increase business impact across online and mobile channels.