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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. 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.
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 lock 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 lock 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.
So, apart from having the lock 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.
Another great tool is the Facebook lock 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.
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!