Social Media and Your Website – They Need Each other Like Peanut Butter Needs Jelly

Social Media Marketing Linking Strategy

Are you using the social media sites correctly to send traffic to your website?

Are you linking to your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Youtube or other social media accounts from your website?

With more than 400 million active users on Facebook, 30  million accounts on Twitter, 100 million U.S. viewers on YouTube, 50 million users on LinkedIn, and 200 million blogs, I’ll assume that you are actively participating on some level with at least a few social media sites.

Beyond using this medium to connect with new groups of people in unique ways, you should be making sure they want to learn more about you and what you have to offer so that they’ll either Google your name or just follow a link-back from the social media sites to your website.

What will visitors  see when they come to your website?

Will they be impressed and want to continue to connect with you or will they get lost in a cluttered mess of confusing layouts, poor navigation and content that reads as a cure for insomnia?

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid and think that you can abandon your regular site and just focus on using the social media sites to connect with your target market.

Today’s Facebook is yesterday’s My Space. Google is king for now, but Bing.com is gaining ground. We’re still in the infancy stages of social media and web 2.o sites. Sure they’ve been around for a few years, but many businesses haven’t figured out how to monetize their Social Media Efforts and many people are clamoring to claim their space and figure it all out.

Think about it – why would you put your business and career 100% into the hands of a third-party site? You wouldn’t. So that means you have to get your site into top shape so that when you attract new visitors and they come to your site looking for social proof and credibility that you are the expert resource they are looking for.

What’s the one thing you could do this week? Go back and look at your website through the eyes of a prospect. Is it clear what you do? Is the focus around YOU or are you clear that the purpose of your website is to be beneficial to the user?

Remember, they don’t care about you until they know the benefits and the problems you can solve that they’ll pay to make go away.

Do you have great copy that’s compelling and solution-oriented with specific action steps on every page? Get your site in shape through the eyes of your prospect and make sure it’s designed from a marketing and sales perspective and not just pretty graphics.  And if you know that your site sucks and you’re ignoring it, what’s the point of driving traffic to it just so it can become a sales-prevention tool?

I used to suggest that you don’t confuse your site visitors and try to avoid having links that take them off your website since you want them to stay, subscribe and buy.  However, now customers are using the social media sites to help make decisions to do business with you, to get to know you better.

In any event, check your website analytics and make sure you have Web 2.o and social media strategy. If it’s not working…. make the changes!