When running a business, it’s essential to have both a website and social media accounts so you can maximize your reachability. One cannot simply replace the other. In fact, the way social media has expanded, they can now compliment and promote each other!
For your website, it is important to have all your social media links proudly visible. If you’re not the one running your website, your designer should have this already in place. If not, from a webmaster’s side of things, it’s not hard to have ready. Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the big boys also offer free image files of their websites so you can utilize it on your website and on other marketing material as well. By going to the source, you’ll have the most recent design of their logos, and you can be sure of the image file’s quality. Be careful though, those suckers can be huge files.
Promote your social media through the content you have posted on your website. Again, don’t forget to have those links in the reader’s line of sight as much as possible, but don’t make your website like a giant pop-up ad.
In addition to the direct links to your social media accounts, you should also have the ability to “Like”, share, “Tweet”, etc. straight from the article or page. This way they don’t have to leave your website, and the customer will now double as a sounding board, proclaiming how awesome your website is. There you go, now your customer is a member of your marketing department.
One of the more popular ways of integrating your social media accounts and your website is to allow them to login via their already existing social media accounts. You might’ve already seen this in place on a lot of retail websites. It allows the customer to bypass filling out forms, and will put them on a one way ticket to that payment screen.
You can also have YouTube videos and social media reviews imbedded right on your page. YouTube can double as another way to push your content and allow the reader or customer to promote for you.
On your social media accounts, always be sure to fill out every applicable field. Most websites will allow you to add URLs to your website, oftentimes to various pages. This way the customer doesn’t have to waste time trying to search for your website on a search engine website. You are in control of where they go to get more information.
Of course, one of the most important parts of social media is posting. When you’re making your updates, and you should be making a lot of them, make sure a good amount of them have a shortened URL that will take them to your website. A post can showcase what you have on your website. You can get some of you more unpopular pages some extra clicks by just showing it off on one of your social media accounts.
As you can see, its more a symbiotic relationship, rather than one replacing the other. They both can help each other, and in the same respect increase your views all around.
For even more interesting ways to integrate your website and social media accounts, check out this great article from Memeburn: http://ow.ly/10AkQi
What are your thoughts? Comment and discuss below!
