Learn how you should be using social media to get more visitors to your small business website. Discover why having control over the platform is crucial.
The video covers the following:
0:05 – How you should be using social media
0:26 – Social media is a source of website traffic
0:54 – You want to have control over the platform
1:38 – Make it easy for people to share your website
2:10 – Facebook for social, Google+ for SEO
2:32 – Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest are popular
3:22 – Facebook “like box” is a handy tool
4:11 – Facebook comments is great for engagement
Full Transcript:
Hi this is Justin Meadows with another website news update. Today, I just want to cover how you should be using social media as part of your online marketing strategy and how you integrate that in to your website.
Firstly, how should you be using social media as part of your overall online marketing strategy. The best way to do this is to use social media as a form of traffic to your website. You want to engage with them through social media, start conversations with them, start getting them familiar with who you are and what you are about and what sort of information you have and what you have to offer for them. Then, take them from those social medial platforms back to your website.
Don’t put your eggs in one basket – social media rules change
You don’t want to be doing all of your business on the social media platform because the rules are constantly changing with the social media platforms. Also, social media platforms will be coming and going. Facebook is pretty solid. It has been around for a long time and doesn’t show any signs of disappearing any time soon, but it changes it rules as regularly as you take the beans out. Sometimes, these rules can really have a big effect on how you’re using the Facebook page to market to your customers.
Integrate social media into your website
Now, there are a few different ways that you can integrate social media with your website to amplify this effect and to sort of make use of that viral social exposure. What you should be doing first off is having share and like buttons readily available on each page of your website, especially on pages that you think are the ones that people are going to want to share with their friends and that you actually want people to be going to. The things like the product sales pages or content that you have put out of valuable information for your customers.
So, you want to have a like button, a Google Plus button is a good one, mainly for its effects in your Google rankings. Not many people actually use Google Plus as a social media platform but it is handy for Google rankings. Twitter is a good one and it is nice and easy. There are quite a few people that use that. LinkedIn may be a good one, depending on your market and Pinterest is another good one if you have a very visual element and lots of images in you content and on your website.
Also include Follow buttons
So, apart from having the like buttons and share buttons readily available, the other thing that you may want to do is have follow buttons so that people can follow you on Facebook and they can click on the button that takes them away to Facebook and they can hit “Like” and start engaging with you on Facebook.
Now, you need to be careful with this. You don’t want that to be the main highlighted feature on your website because what you are essentially doing is that you are sending people away from your website when you do that. You are bleeding customers away from your site. You want to be doing the reverse. You want to be bringing them from Facebook to you, but you want to have that option available. It is worth putting it there but perhaps not giving it so much emphasis.
Facebook Like box is a great tool
Another great tool is the Facebook like box. This allows you to have a little widget in the bottom or in the sidebar of your website which displays the faces of people who are following you on Facebook. It also may show the latest item that you have published on to your Facebook page. This can be really powerful, especially if you do have a large fan base because it will show, by default, the friends of the person who is viewing your website. It automatically links up with Facebook. If they are logged in to Facebook it will show them their friends who “Like” you already and that could be a really powerful message to be sending to people. It is well worth having that, especially once you have established a decent fan base on Facebook.
Allow people to place their comments
Another great integration tool between Facebook and your website is Facebook comments, especially for a blog. This will allow people to comment on your blog using Facebook comments which gives them the option to automatically post that comment to Facebook as well. That Facebook comment will appear in their fate and show all of their friends that they just commented on your blog. It then drives their friends to your blog and builds more social interaction. Again, it has that effect of showing the faces of the other people that have commented and the other people that have liked that page. It can also be a very powerful message.
Another reason that I like to use Facebook comments is because you need to be logged in to Facebook, it is a lot less prone to spam comments, which is a problem which is faced by every blog owner. When you allow comments on your blog, you are opening yourself up to spam comments and Facebook really reduces that.
I hope that you got a lot out of this. If you have any other questions, please comment below using the Facebook comments underneath this blog post and I will talk to you soon. Cheers!
