Social media is one of the most powerful mediums that almost any business can use to market its products and services. Even if you don’t want to sell goods and services directly through your Facebook page or LinkedIn profile, it is still a great way to enhance your brand’s visibility as well as the visibility of your key members. How can you achieve successful social media integration with your online marketing strategy?
Put Social Media Buttons on All Content and Online Properties
With a few lines of code, you can put social media buttons on every piece of content that you create and on each web and landing page that you have. This enables anyone who sees a great article that your CEO wrote to share it with friends or tweet the landing page to a free eBook that your company is offering. As long as the content is meaningful, it should see hundreds or even thousands of shares, which means new readers without any effort on your part.
Use Ethical Bribes to Increase Social Media Engagement
An ethical bribe occurs when a website visitor is given something of value in exchange for signing up for a newsletter or for posting a link on Twitter or Facebook. For instance, a website may offer a free eBook or may even offer paid content for free in exchange for liking or sharing content on social media. This is effective because search engines take social signals when determining where a piece of content is ranked. You get the same effect regardless of whether you use such a bribe or if content is tweeted or liked organically.
Use Your Existing Networks to Grow Your Social Networks
Your current friends, family members and professional contacts can be leveraged to increase your social media exposure when you first start out. An example of this would be emailing a link to your mother who would then share it with her friends at work. They would then share it and create the foundation for your social network.
Social media integration is a powerful tool that every company should use regardless of how large it is. Combined with well-executed social media optimization, you can increase targeted traffic to your site or landing page or make it easier to grow your social following. This will make it easier to increase sales and create and effective brand for your business.
Sources:
The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration, Mashable.com
9 Tips for Integrating Social Media on Your Website, Socialmediaexaminer.com
