Your website linked with a strong social media presence lets you educate, engage and identify prospects / Richard Young from Nimble

Richard Young from Nimble writes ..  

Your website linked with a strong social media presence lets you educate, engage and identify prospects.

If you remember when the World Wide Web launched, you probably recall how primitive the earliest commercial websites were. They had certainly progressed from the very first web page ever published — a directory to information about the WWW project – but they lacked today’s video and audio abilities, high quality graphics, speed and navigational prowess.

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Websites have travelled light years since those early days. We can be entertained, enlightened and buy online.  We can communicate with people in real-time from around the globe. We can learn about anything –  including Prince Harry’s recent Las Vegas holiday.

Our highly-evolved websites seem to have taken a back seat to today’s preoccupation with social media. Social networks are providing great been fits to businesses large and small, but your website should be the centre of your company’s online universe. After all, it’s where you can tell your whole story – and where your sales happen.

Create bi-directional, Specific Connections

Your social media content should be driving visitors back to it, and your website should be returning the favor. Here, are five ways to do that.

Leverage granularity, which is just a phrase for the process of directing your social media audience to specific pages on your website, and vice versa. Google likes these deep linksand is more impressed when you send people to them rather than your site’s home page.

Consider having multiple social media landing pages based on the different aspects of your business. If  you only have a few products, devote a separate page to each for each social stream. This increases the likelihood that your visitors will actually read your content and respond.

Toot your own horn. If people are leaving positive comments on your blog or social media sites? Take the best of them and drop them – sparingly – on your website.  Only well written ones please.

Offer can’t-be-missed sharing options. Make sharing as easy as possible from your website. For example, if you post a great product photo that might attract attention elsewhere, be sure it can be easily shared. Make your Share links obvious and pepper your site with them.

Build ubiquitous, interactive roadmaps. Encourage traffic in all directions. Put links on all of your social media streams and your website(s) so that readers don’t have to open another browser tab themselves, or worse, leave the current page.

If you use videos, drop them directly in your YouTube channel and then embed them on your site. You can use YouTube’s server space and sharing tools.

Obsess over your website, just as you do your social media presence. Your website is the only online property where you’re in control. Tweak it continuously, and test different approaches.

Try not to think of your website and social streams as separate entities, though they clearly have different tasks. Look at them as spokes on your online marketing wheel – with your website directly in the centre.