Let’s get started with social media integration! Or, should we? The answer is, almost always!

Of course we’re being vague, but making the decision to begin social media integration with your website will depend on your business and a few other factors. If moving forward you’ll need an action plan to determine which networks to integrate and how to best achieve your goals.

Before we go much further we want to make one point clear. For the sake of sharing the information within and providing examples, we have linked to some of our social pages. Done right, we use social media integration to drive traffic to our websites from our social network pages. Not the other way around!

Social Media Integration

Are you’re selling a product or service directly to consumers or to business? For example, if you’re a B2C business and selling products or services to consumers, social media integration is a huge benefit! On the other hand, if your business focuses on B2B sales, we’ll still use social media integration, but with a different approach. Then again, if selling rocket fuel to NASA, we’d be safe in skipping social media entirely!

If selling products or services directly to the consumer, at the very least we recommend integrating Facebook and Twitter. Then, add whichever other social networks you prefer. When business sales is focused on selling to other companies, LinkedIn would be the obvious choice!

TIP: Even if not choosing social media integration, your business still needs a Google Plus page. Google Plus is much more than a social network. It’s crucial to have a Google Plus page that is connected to your Google verified website. This one action, more than anything else mentioned here, will help your website get found in Google search.

If deciding to move forward, we’ll need to map out a comprehensive and strategic plan of action. We begin by creating new social media pages or re-designing the old. Then, we create custom functions into the website to insure smooth integration with your social pages.

The nuts and bolts of the actual social media integration is only the beginning. The tricky part is researching exactly what type of your web content will be shared to the social networks.

Even more important, as any marketing expert will agree, timing is everything. Then again, we can plan the logistics all we want, but there’s no sense doing much of anything until the social media integration is complete.

We offer social network page design services and customized integration with your website. Contact us to learn more about our Social Media Services. petegregory@assiststart.com.

Here are some examples of how we might approach social media integration with a new or updated website.

• First, create well designed business pages on the target social networks. Social page images and written content should be consistent, matching your brand across all networks. If you’re not doing this, we suggest researching or reading up on branding your business.
• Certainly, we’ll want to display the friendly well known social icons on your website. Seeing these familiar icons make your visitors feel more comfortable.
• Not every page on your website should include social media integration. We plan this when mapping out the design in advance of production.
• We know how important page speed is to sales and SEO. Some web designers are unaware of how badly most social media plugin’s slow down page loads. We usually avoid these plugins and use lean CSS coding instead.
• We offer certain special customizations that save time and money in the future. We create functions so every time a new blog post is added, it automatically pushes that post out to your social network of choice.
• We can go one step further and make any posts published in a specific category to automatically post to one network while posts and another category go to a different social network. Normally, some topics go over well on Facebook but others might fair better for Twitter.
• Huge Tip! In all instances be sure to integrate with your Google Plus page. Google Plus is much more than just a social network and we urge our visitors to get one now!
• There’s much more but please remember, effective social media integration requires a well thought out strategy. Every website post, every social share and every web page published should be based on a strategic plan of action.

Well designed and structured social media integration will result and more traffic to your website and increased revenue for your business. Certainly, there are costs associated with building out the integrations, but the ROI will be well worth it!

Is Social Media for Everyone?

Social network business pages and media integration is not for every business. However, we’ve seen first hand the benefits of increased website traffic resulting in more revenue. Some of our clients are not interested in Facebook or Twitter because they feel those are more for personal use. This is true to a certain extent but it really depends on the business type.

A commercial property management company or commercial property broker could benefit by integrating their websites with Linkedin. Also, there are industry specific professional networks most of us have not heard of. Even though we may not know it, when it’s time to search out a professional in that specific field, those special industry specific networks come into play, ranking high in the search engines.

Regardless of the industry, there’s a network for all and just waiting to be leveraged as an effective social media integration for your websites.

Your Business Website – Primary Online Hub

We encourage our visitors to remember the basics. The online presence of any business all starts with how well their website ranks in the search results. This is not a social network. This is your website! Not your Linkedin page, Facebook page, or any other social network page. Social media matters, and it matters a lot! As a result we leverage our social media pages to help drive traffic to our hub, our website.

We Do Not Own Our Social Network Pages

Never forget, we own our websites and have full control the content displayed within. The idea is to use social media integration to drive traffic back to our websites. Facebook controls our Facebook pages, Linkedin controls our pages on their site. Each social media outlet controls what we can and cannot display. They can and will terminate service, even if by mistake. Never forget, we are just their guests! We highly suggest our visitors refrain from taking up permanent residence and thinking a social media page is their home page.

How Can We Help?

Here at Assist Start we provide our friends and clients with a variety of services including social media page setup, design and management. Once we finish with the custom integrations we often continue to create and publish blog content while managing their social networks at the same time. Our regular clients continue using us, not because we’re good guys, but because the cost associated with our services is easily offset with increased revenue.

Contact us to learn if your company can benefit from our social media integration package. petegregory@assiststart.com