5 tips to social media-ise your small business website

January 24th, 2010 by Social Small Biz

Much of what you do with social media in your small business will be designed to pull people towards a destination. More often than not, this destination will be your website.

But there is another way to think about this to – in the opposite direction; pushing visitors to your website towards your social media channels. There are a few good reasons for doing this:

• Customer retention – by striking up a relationship with your customers on social media channels, you can get in touch with them more often and constantly be on their radar
• Catch prospects – often visitors to your site might not be ready to convert (buy, sign up etc.). But by giving them an option to stay in touch with social media, you will be able to retain a connection with them until the point they are ready to do business with you, and beyond

So what are the things you need to consider to social media-ise your small business website?

1. Include follow me on Twitter/Facebook links – this is perhaps the easiest thing to do. Simply add these links to your site and you’ll be amazed how many visitors sign up
2. Integrate your blog into the website – do you have a blog? Is it on some other URL or a separate subdomain? Do you link to it on your website? Add a link to your blog on your top navigation bar and, while you are at it, why not feature your latest blog post on your homepage?
3. Consider adding comments to pages – do you have products on your website? Why not open up comments on these pages so that your customers can leave their own reviews – good and bad. Remember to respond to any comments if necessary – good and bad!
4. Add ‘share this’ links – as well as adding links to your profiles on social networks, you should also add ‘share this’ links. These will allow your visitors to quickly and easily share pages they like with their like-minded friends or even by email
5. Encourage visitors to sign-up to an email marketing newsletter – not strictly social media, but it is still worth making sure your email newsletter sign-up form is clearly visible. There are some great ways to encourage social media through email marketing as well
6. Consider adding a forum – if you have lots of regular visitors, then consider adding a forum to your site. Forums aren’t necessarily that expensive to set up and are a great way to help customers to help each other, thereby reducing some of your customer service costs
7. Add social media profiles to your contact page – rather than just the normal email and phone options, why not add your social media contact details on your contact page as well? Just make sure you are monitoring mentions of your brand!

What else is there? What are the other ways you social media-ise your website?

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