Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Youtube should work together with your website to promote your online brand.
Are you leveraging the power of social media on your site? If you’re like most businesses, you’re probably missing out on potential interactions, impressions and ultimately sales. Courtesy of our friends at the Social Media Examiner, below is a quick how-to guide to ensure your business website and social media platforms are working together to maximize your online exposure.
It's a no-brainer but double-check how many of your competitors aren't doing it. Best practice is for social media buttons to at the top, bottom or along the side of your home page. Links or buttons should remain in your navigation as users move from page to page. To ensure that users don’t exit your web page altogether, you can create buttons or links that open your social media pages in a new window.
Don't get trapped into linking to all social media channels you’ve dabbled in. If you’re fonder of Twitter and have completely abandoned your Facebook page, there’s no reason to link to any outlet that is not being actively managed. In fact, linking out to inactive channels can ultimately cause more harm than good.
If you use social media to keep your customers up to date with your current products and offerings and are actively managing your outlets on a daily or bi-weekly basis, it might be worth showcasing your Twitter feed or Facebook posts directly on your website.
Social media changes fast. So if you added your buttons a year ago, they are probably "walking with the dinosaurs" today. Facebook fans morphed into Likes, group pages died, +1 is spanking new and LinkedIn improved significantly. Do research to find the most current social media terminology so you don’t get caught mumbling about “The Facebook” and “The Twitter.”
If you sell a product or run an eCommerce site and haven’t added share buttons to your product pages, you're missing out on a whole host of potential impressions. Share buttons should enable visitors to your website to seamlessly share or recommend a product. Similar to eCommerce sites, if you have resources, articles, a blog or other valuable content on your site, you should attempt to make it as simple as possible for readers to share it with others.
Check out AddThis or ShareThis for a solution here. Both provide efficient and easy-to-use solutions for social media sharing across eCommerce sites with the added benefit of analytics to see how the content is getting shared.
Pay attention to the number of clicks on your outbound social media links by tapping into Google Analytics. An easy way to explore this is by setting up Event Tracking. Google provides a step-by-step guide on how to incorporate the correct codes into your site. If you find that few individuals explore your social media outlets once landing on your page, perhaps your social media buttons aren’t in a convenient location.
Many types of software allow you to see your social media insights alongside your web analytics in order to pick up on trends and to better understand the successes or failures of campaigns. SproutSocial allows users to compare web analytics and social media reporting information from specific timeframes side by side. Being able to see the way in which your social media and website analytics relate proves useful in establishing goals, measuring successes and identifying areas in which you can improve.
Even some major brands continue using social media in ways that violate the platforms’ terms and conditions. You can't use Google+ for contest entries, a personal Facebook page shouldn’t be used to operate a brand and there are certain rules to adhere to when running a promotion on Facebook. The way you use social media reflects on your website, as well as your brand as a whole. If you’ve accidentally violated some terms and conditions in the past, delete those pages and do not link out to them even in the interim.
With the changing social media landscape these days, it is easy to confuse social media features. Keep in mind:
You won’t be directing individuals to your Facebook page by installing a Facebook “Like” button on a specific website page. Instead, you are allowing individuals to “Like”/share the information, content or product that is found on that specific page. There is no correlation between Liking a specific website page and directing users to “Like” your branded Facebook page.
You want to make sure that compelling information is easily shareable, but littering social media share buttons all over your webpage isn’t the way to go. Before adding share buttons to a page, ask yourself, “Is there information here that people would find worth sharing?”
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Inbound Marketing describes the practice of bringing warm, qualified leads into a business’ sales funnel rather than reaching outward to cold, questionable targets through traditional marketing means. Inbound Marketing is becoming more popular as businesses look for efficient and affordable ways to acquire new business leads. Even without the marketing budgets of their larger corporate competitors, small to medium sized businesses can successfully compete by embracing the techniques of Inbound Marketing.
Outbound Marketing includes old school methods such as cold calls, mass mail outs, print ads, attending tradeshows, TV advertising and the like. Outbound marketing is largely a numbers game and to get a product or service in front of as many cold leads as possible and entice them up to the point where they decide to buy. Ok if you’ve got the budget to get a TV ad produced and buy expensive air time. These methods have there place but with consumers becoming more cynical towards traditional forms of advertising, Outbound Marketing is becoming less efficient with businesses wasting time appealing to tons of people who have no interest in their offering. People are more in control of what information they receive and how. Channel surfing, SPAM filters, use of caller id, no junk mail lists are all ways that increasingly time poor consumers are more and more screening out the unwanted distractions of Outbound Marketing.
Rather than interrupting people to get their attention, Inbound Marketing relies on the principle that the customers with the highest sales conversion potential are those that find and come to you. The most important part of a successful Inbound Marketing strategy is creating quality website content that will bring people into your sales process. By creating great content, you'll rise in internet search results, create linkable content, and educate your audience. All of these outcomes will help you bring in warm leads that have been pre-qualified as interested in your product or service by searching terms relevant terms or by reading similar content that links to you. Successful Inbound Marketing requires that a business has a website optimized to close leads into deals and engages visitors once they "land" on your website.
The creation of a blog is another essential technique in exploiting the benefits of Inbound Marketing. In addition to blogging, there are many other forms of great content to create that will bring interested visitors. Use of social media, hosting webinars, offering free or low cost e-books for download, and developing microsites are other methods to attract leads that are interested in a company’s particular offerings and more eager to engage in a conversation.
So the philosophy of Inbound Marketing is to focus marketing effort on filling your sales funnel with pre-qualified leads that discover your company. In that way the message about a product or service is greeted by welcoming ears rather than random outbound contacts.
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