Facebook does it.
Twitter does it.
Google Plus and LinkedIn do it, too.
What do they do? They have badges that their members can easily embed on their own sites to help increase their following on the various social networks.
Badges are relatively easy to create as long as you know some basic HTML. There are several benefits to creating a badge and having others post it on their sites, including:
- Increased brand recognition
- External backlinks to your site
- Exposure to a wide ranging audience
- Increased traffic to your site
There are many reasons you can use to create a badge and ask others to place it on their sites.
At the Bonfire, we have badges that our members can create and embed on their sites to increase their following on the community. The badges also help us increase our brand recognition and referral traffic.
Here’s an example of our badge:
Bonfire contributor Emily Suess created a badge to help promote her writing contest and asked her readers to place it on their sites.
So, as you can see, there are many different reasons to create an embeddable badge. How have you used badges? Have they helped with increasing your following or driving more traffic to your site?
Image credit: nem_youth