As a B2B marketer, one approach to getting the maximum lift for your social media marketing campaign is to find ways to integrate social media with your corporate website. At one time, your social media sites and corporate website might have co-existed peacefully, but now the emphasis is on integration and the free cross-border flow of information. In today’s digital world, all websites need to be social and here are five ways to achieve that:
IDEA #1: Add social sharing buttons to all of your website content
The key is getting users to share your content, and that means plenty of social sharing buttons. Today, there are so many tools for cutting and clipping content users find on the web and sharing it on their social networks. You want to enable this process as much as possible. With tools from companies such as OneAll, this is easier than you might think. Soon, people will be sharing your how-to videos, whitepapers and blog posts across social networks.
IDEA #2: Add social login functionality
This might sound simple – enabling people to login to your page using their Facebook ID – but it’s remarkably powerful, especially if they are still prospects and not yet customers. That’s because people are remarkably averse to providing any more personal information than they have to. By providing a social login option, you are lowering the barriers for them to sign up. People don’t even have to provide an email or name, and they’re ready to go. And now that just about everyone has a Facebook page, this is even more of a no-brainer.
IDEA #3: Analyze your social traffic constantly
The first step is generating traffic between your website and your social networks, such as your company’s Facebook page. The next step is measuring and analyzing this traffic, in order to understand how content posted on, say, Facebook, can impact user behaviors on your website. Maybe you’ve promoted a new corporate blog post in a Facebook status update, and now those readers are migrating over to your website to read the blog post. The focus should be on the content that’s resonating the most with users and that is the most engaging.
IDEA #4: Create user communities, forums and live discussions
This one is a bit harder than the others to pull off without the help of an experienced vendor. But with the help of a vendor like ONEsite (formerly known as SocialCore), you can connect professionals, fans and users – and give them a place to hang out and discuss their issues. The reason why this is so brilliant is because it means that potential prospects and customers are no longer just headed to a traditional B2B community like LinkedIn to hang out – they are now coming to your website, turning it into a real destination.
IDEA #5: Build better customer personas
The more you know about your customer, the better. That’s why social media can be such an important trove of information. When you know that your customers like to hang out on Twitter more than on Facebook, that they’ve been sharing certain types of photos on Instagram, or that they tend to “like” pages in completely different verticals and industries, those are all behaviors that can be used to build out your customer personas. You know have a conduit into the psychological profile of the customer, not just the demographic profile, and that means you can construct the best possible customer personas.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.