In this day and age when your website needs to be more than a static repository of your content, you would do well to investigate all the different ways you can employ social media into your site as a way of making sure you’re not only keeping up with your customers and prospects, but that you aren’t falling irretrievably behind your competitors, who DO employ sound social media methods. Let’s look at some of the essentials of social media, and how to use them.
In this Web 2.0 world, making sure your site can use certain tools is more important than ever. While your site doesn’t technically have to BE a blog, it should operate like one, with RSS feed functionality, social bookmarking capabilities, user comments, and tagging available. While all these elements are standard on most CMS systems, you may need to find ways to import them if you have a static HTML site. Not impossible, just more steps, but definitely worth it.
Some of the advantages of a system like this are that it enables you to regularly publish new and current content to your own site, as well as letting your users contribute, which serves the purpose of having your readers build your content by virtue of their comments and contributions to your site. This is an easy way to build a large, user-driven content site.
Make sure you make tagging and bookmarking your content an easy and inviting thing to do. Just the “Tweet This” function alone is an easy way to get your content distributed ever more widely on the Web.
Allow your visitors to submit content for consideration as well, along with using polls and surveys to gauge what it is your audience us actually interested in. Keeping them engaged is key to keeping them coming back!
Make sure you take advantage of whatever social media networks you feel comfortable using, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or another. Making sure your visitors know how to socially interact with you is paramount, particularly if you hope to establish yourself as an authority, or at least hope to attract a following. There are many tools to help you implement this on your site, especially for Twitter, so there is really no excuse not to be socially available, unless that’s just not part of your plan or who you are.
Making it easy for you visitors to reach you and follow you is a marvelous tool that wasn’t even in existence five years ago. The reach and power of tools like these developed in the social landscape are making it easier than ever to create customer bases that can be built into a huge asset over a very short period of time. Think about how long it took to find a list of thousands of prospects a decade ago, and how fast you can achieve that now, and you’ll start to understand why this is so worth the effort!
