Top tips: 5 Key Ingredients of Social Media for Your Website

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• Ingredient 1 - Your website must be the core of your social media strategy

Social Media is hot! Leveraging the popularity of websites like Twitter and Facebook lets you drive targeted traffic to your website.

Lifescript.com is a popular online women’s community that uses Facebook and Twitter to expand the reach of its community and grow its email list to over 11 million subscribers.

• Ingredient 2 - Unify your website goals with your social media strategy

Successful websites have a clear purpose and a defined set of business goals. Your social media strategy must be in alignment with these goals.

Domino’s uses Twitter and YouTube to sell more pizza. They engage their customers using social media campaigns that drive visitors to their website where they can easily place orders for their favorite pizza.

• Ingredient 3 - Funneling more leads to your website

Your website must engage your visitors so they’ll share contact information with you. You can engage visitors by providing instructional content, holding contests or by providing content that helps them in some way.

Duck Brand has engaged a generation of teenagers through its Stuck at the Prom contest. By engaging the teenagers, Duck Brand now has over 1.3 million fans on its Facebook fan page which have turned into customers of Duck Tape.

• Ingredient 4 - Leverage user-generated content on your website

Popular websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are driven by user-generated content.  Make it easy for your visitors to share content so they’ll keep coming back.

The Knot let’s engaged couples create personal profiles where they share stories and photos of their weddings. By making it easy for couples to share content, TheKnot.com has become the premier wedding planning website.

• Ingredient 5 - Measuring the social media impact on your website

Measuring social media is more than counting your website visitors.

Defining Social Media Success

• What kind of web experience are you creating?
• What is your “online reputation?”
• Do we have any “dead” online properties i.e. inactive Facebook Fan Page or LinkedIn Group?
• Did your Tweet generate more traffic?
• Do certain topics generate more comments?
• Sample Measurements – 2010 Super Bowl Ads

75% of the 38 brands advertised during the Super Bowl reported twice as many blog posts about their product on Super Bowl Sunday compared with levels on Sundays over the previous six months – source http://www.rbr.com/media-news/advertising/20997.html

Social Media Measurement Tools

KDPaine DYI Dashboard              

Tealium Social Media  

Radian 6

Meltwater Buzz

• Conclusion

Never before have we seen a phenomenon like social media. People are telling us exactly what they like and dislike so we can create highly targeted campaigns to grab their attention. By tapping into these online conversations we can drive the right people to our website and give them exactly what they’re looking for.

By Ted Prodromou

Online Marketing/SEO Analyst

 Sitecore

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