“Social Media” has become a big buzz word. People are setting up accounts with Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter, etc. In this article I’d like to share a few tips that you can implement for your website to maximize the results from your “social media” efforts.
- Add social share to your site
- Link people to your social media accounts
- Pull in tweet updates to display on your sites
- Boost account registration via Facebook Connect
- SEO and online directories
Add social share to your site
Thanks to AddThis.com, you can easily share your web pages with minimal effort, whether you have a CMS (Content Management System) website or a simple HTML website. By easy, I mean, as easy as a few button clicks on AddThis website, then copy and paste a piece of code to your website, and you can get a nice sharing widget like the following:
If you have a few more moments to spare, you can customize the look of the widget and what social media sites to include in the widget. You can even add Google Analytic code in to track how people are using the widget.
Link people to your social media accounts
This is a simple one. You can add to page header or on the sidebar of your site – links to your Facebook fan club, Fackbook page, Linked-in profile, or twitter page. It’s a nice way to send people to see your profile and updates on those social media sites.
Pull in tweet updates to display on your sites
If you twit frequently, it might make sense for you to directly pull in your late twits to display directly on your website. Just put the following code on your page, preferably close to the bottom of the page. Replace “username” with your twitter user name.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=1"></script>
Then add the following HTML to where you like the update list be displayed:
<ul id="twitter_update_list"></ul>
Boost account registration via Facebook Connect
If you have a website that requires users to register and interact with the site, you might want to consider using Facebook Connect to integrate registration with Facebook. People have reported increased registration, more site traffic and increased user engagement with this tool.
SEO and online directories
These are not new concepts but here but I like to share an online tool Website Grader. Using this tool, you can check your own website or your competitor’s websites. It tells you lots of information about a website including:
- Number of Google indexed pages of this site
- Whether this site has been submitted to major directories
- Overall SEO score along with a few tips and suggestions for improvement
Key Takeaway
Managing a website takes effort but it doesn’t always have to be big investments. Utilizing existing tools and resources can save money and get results.