Getting Your Website Integrated With Social Media

Until recently business owners considered Social Media a passing fad. Now even the big business have realised the immense potential of this as a marketing tool and have embraced this marketing phenomenon with open arms. The obvious next step of course is to integrate social media with the business website. While this may sound difficult to anyone outside the technology industry, it really is not difficult. Essentially using Social Media is just another way of expanding channels of communication with prospects and customers using content in different forms that are already prevalent, such as video, audio and text.

The very mention of Social Media brings to mind the task of untangling the maze of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and other popular platforms. The integration of these with a company website can be explained with a simple analogy. Most business owners have offices and invite prospects and customers to visit these offices so they can initiate a business discussion. However to get these prospects and customers business owners go to events, conferences and business meetings to spread the message about their business. Integrating social media into a website involves taking the where the prospects and customers are, so that they can connect and initiate communication with the business.

Auditing a website for Social Media content

The first step in the integration process is to take stock of the website content in terms of the video, audio, images and text being used. Video has gained immense popularity with webmasters for ranking purposes. The audit should focus on pages that get updated often, such as the home page or the blog which are likely to generate the most feedback. These pages have the greatest benefit as a result of dialog with prospects and customers. The audit should not be limited to the website alone. It is important to determine where conversations are occurring. Find out as much as possible about how clients communicate and ways social media can be used to keep the conversations flowing.

Having completed the social media website audit, the next step is to set objectives for each use of the different types of content being used in the website - text, video, audio and so on. Once you've gathered your audit of text, audio, images, and video, determine what the objectives are for each of those uses. Keep the objectives brief and simple, limiting them to two or three sentences.

Scoping social media tools

After the objectives for the content currently existing on the website have been determined, the various tools that can help meet these objectives need to be considered. To make it easier first consider the broad groups of tools, such as video sharing sites, photo sharing sites and so on. A video sharing site such as YouTube is excellent for showcasing products and posting testimonials. Twitter on the other hand is excellent for quick updates, customer feedback and generating targeted traffic.

While selecting the specific tools to be used, it is important to focus on the objectives rather than the familiarity with the tools. It is also a good idea to document reasons why a particular tool was selected in case future changes to the tool may not meet the objectives.

Having selected the social media tools for website integration, it is important to allocate resources to manage the integration process on an ongoing basis. Management will need to determine how the employee will be able to manage the additional workload to fit into the current job portfolio and whether it is worthwhile hiring dedicated staff for just this purpose.

The reward of website integration with social media

For the uninitiated, the use of social media will involve a steep learning curve initially and a behaviourial change in accepting that social media eventually leads to more effective communication with prospects and clients. With practiced use, businesses will find a reduction in incoming phone calls and email, so employees can manage their time more efficiently.

Integrating social media with a company website is also more interactive and fun. A Twitter post from a manager on the company website indicating they are busy in an afternoon meeting will indicate to a client why they may not be answering their mobile phone. Content that is being produced by employees can often be beneficial for prospects and clients. For instance managers who take great pains to produce Power Point presentations at business conferences, can upload these to a blog hosted on the company website, so that customers unable to attend the conference can view the presentation, as can other who may have an interest in the subject. In this way the conversation is expanded to reach a far wider audience with minimum effort.

Integrating social media into the business website should not be rushed into, but implemented in a manner that is consistent with the corporate identity. Rather than being an ad hoc addition to a website, social media should form one of the key components of the website. The process should be simple and not painful, aimed at tackling three challenges. These are - moving business conversations across to a dynamic medium, reaching a wider audience and using platforms that allow for easier content updating. Social media provides an amazing opportunity to propel web content can to new heights provided a clear roadmap is laid out.

Logan Nathan is a full time Internet Marketing & Social Media Marketing professional based in Sydney, Australia. His profile can be viewed at http://logannathan.com.au and you can follow him on twitter http://twitter.com/logannathan

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Why Social Media is So Valuable to Your Website

For the last two centuries media publishing houses have controlled the flow of information to and from people. Media giants such as News Corporation and Liberty Media have controlled large media distribution networks which distributed news and informational content around the globe. While the effectiveness of these media giants can only grow if they effectively use the internet social media has opened up the door to the average person to distribute their content, ideas and information on a large global scale.

This is one of the reasons that social media and social media marketing is so exciting for so many people and businesses and why it is great for people and their freedom of speech and information. Social media sites like Digg give you the ability to quickly syndicate content from your blog or website and broadcast it the rest of the world. Unlike traditional media the users of social media choose which articles are the most interesting by submitting their feedback and effectively voting for the content. The more users vote for a piece the more traffic that article will get in a typical circumstance.

What is great about this system is that the best content typically goes to the top of the pile. The web is so large it is very hard for social media marketers to manipulate the amount of votes they need to get their sites to the top of social media syndication before they get caught and banned. Of course as you would expect when the stakes are high many people have tried to game the system on sites like Digg. It's fair game too with a first page listing on Digg bringing anywhere up to 200,000 unique visitors a day. Sites such as Slashdot have had a similar effect leading to the spotlight overnight for some websites and e-businesses.

Even still though very few good social media products have been created for social media marketing for companies wanting to promote their websites and content until recently. Even though there have been some good free tools like Social Bookmarker and AddUrl most webmasters and internet marketers have had to use spammy software or consume time submitting their content to all the relevant sites. Recently though a product called Traffic Android was released that automates the time consuming sign up and submission process to social media sites. Is this the first of I'm sure many such helpful tools that will enter the market and help Social Media grow rapidly rather than detracting from it.

The ability for webmasters to rapidly distribute their content and information is an extremely powerful benefit of web 2.0 and the integration of social media with social networking is another step to marking powerful web content syndication a reality. There are now tools than integrate Twitter feeds with Facebook news feeds which is extremely powerful and perhaps the most intelligent tool ever invented. This means not only can you almost instantly distribute your content through Social Media, you can also post a link and short snippet about your content on Twitter and have it syndicate through your friend network on Facebook.

While social media marketing is still a very new phenomenon, I hope this illustrates the impact it can have on your website. As the medium evolves and better search and syndication technologies grow it's power can only increase. My tip is it's best to get involved now before hundreds of thousands of other webmasters get involved and big media companies come in and start buying up all the social media companies.

For more information on Social Media Marketing, check out Peter Laurent's business blog [http://www.peterlaurent.com]. Peter is a Brisbane SEO consultant and has successfully ran Social Media Marketing [http://www.peterlaurent.com] campaigns that quickly generated hundreds of unique qualified visitors per day.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.