If you’ve had any success with using social media to increase the traffic to your website, you may have noticed that you usually get a spike in traffic which often goes back to original levels.  While getting a spike in traffic might be nice (or not nice if it crashes your website), if your traffic goes back to the original levels, you’ve lost an opportunity to convert some of those people to long-term visitors.  Traffikd has a good article with some ways to try to convert traffic spikes from social media into long-term visitors - Social Media Marketing: Getting Long-Term Results.  A summary of things to consider from the post:

• Subject of your posts
• Tone of your Posts
• Targeted Social Media
• Timing
• Potential Impact
• The Needs that are Met by the Post

While Traffikd’s post focuses mostly on blogs, these techniques can also be used on your business website.  It is important to maintain a customer-centric design by keeping the needs of your customers in mind with your content (and your design, layout, etc.).  The customers who visit your website are who provide the return on investment (ROI) for your website.

What’s worked for your business website in terms of social media?  Please share in the comments below.

Joshua Porter is offering a free chapter of his book, Designing for the Social Web.  The book is geared towards web designers and developers, but this chapter has some great tips for what to put on your website or social network to entice visitors to sign up.  Most importantly it shows you how to put yourself into the shoes of your visitors to understand what information they need in order to understand what your website is about and what they’ll get out of signing up.  Next is understanding how the site works and how to sign up…. worth checking out.

If you are wondering about using Twitter for your Business, Web Strategist has a good article on the steps involved - Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter.

Here is a synopsis of the steps:

Babysteps:

• Identifying if this is the right marketplace
• Listening to clean insight
• Registering the namesake

Walking:

• Decide on the persona
• Decide on the method of engagement
• Examine the digital communications policy

Running:

• Integration with other tools
• Aggregation and joining conversations
• What’s next

Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, internet consulting, internet business strategy

Traffkid has put together 35 Must-Read Articles for Social Media Marketers, which has a good breadth of articles from the basics to more advanced topics involving strategy.  If you are interested in learning how social media (and social networks) can help build your business website, there are some good articles to check out.

Twitter has recently appeared on the media bingo card - both for technical problems with the service and as a new way to reach your customers.  Twittering for business can be a great way to keep your customers informed, but more importantly it can be a great conversation tool.  However, too often businesses jump into the next big thing without fully understanding how to use it for business purposes.  The problem with social media technologies like twitter is that not jumping in can be detrimental as well.  If you’re interested in learning more about how not to fail with Twitter, Web Strategist has required reading: Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter.

“Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that’s all I care to share about myself - will you be my friend?” Silly as that sounds, this is the way users of many social web applications greet each other. It’s not very useful or inspiring.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you’re talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though? - ReadWriteWeb - Eight Ways to Get Users to Fill Out Their Profiles

ReadWriteWeb’s article describes a common problem on social networking sites - getting users to engage and fill out their information (let alone post and contribute).  Their suggestions mostly depend on the functionality of the social networking software, but here are some ideas from a community evangelist and internet marketing viewpoint:

• Reach out - If you greet new users and make them feel welcome, they are more likely to put the time into their profile and the community.  Reaching out to users who haven’t updated their profile can have a similar result.  Sometimes people just need to feel a
• Highlight - By highlighting changes and updates that are made on profiles throughout the site, people may be reminded or enticed to update their own profile (people love to be famous)
• Feature - Choose some interesting profiles to feature on the social network to showcase good profiles - sometimes people just need a good example.
• Recommend - Recommending people to each other based on their profiles can be a powerful way to get people to connect.  For empty profiles, make note of this possibility for when it is filled out.
• Entice - Sometimes good old marketing schemes like free giveaways are the only way to get certain people off the couch.  Offering a discount or freebie from your business may be relatively cheap way to accomplish this.

Getting people to fill out their profiles is important not only from a business standpoint (yours), but also for encouraging new people to join.  People will be reluctant to contribute or give you information if they community does not seem to be active.  You may need to recruit some go-getters to help you get things rolling.

If you have ideas or ways that have worked on your own social networks, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

One way to increase the awareness of your products and services (and your brand) is to have your website and/or blog content show up on social networking sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, etc.  Users of these social networks will hopefully discover your useful content and visit your site - possibly becoming returning visitors and passing on your name to co-workers, family and friends.  Social networking sites usually have different types of audiences, so it is worth investigating them to see which ones work best for your target visitors.

Here is an summary of some of the top social networking sites:

• Digg - Started initially in the tech industry as a way to link and rank news and articles and has quickly spread to gaming, and off-the-wall.  Digg is trying to widen their audience, but in my experience, many business-related articles are quickly lost in their huge amount of submissions.
• FaceBook - Started as college students only, but now open to all.  Best for connecting with long-lost friends and for networking with acquaintances.  There are business networks and groups, but FaceBook does not make it easy to separate close friends with business networking acquaintances.  One possibility is to create two personas - one for work and one for personal use.  Posts from your blog can be displayed in your profile and you can create pages to promote your business.
• MySpace - Probably one of the more mainstream of the social networks, MySpace is heavily used by younger generations and by entertainment and music groups wanting to connect with their fans.
• LinkedIn - Targets business users who want to keep track of their networking contacts.  Business can join and create groups to promote themselves.
• Del.icio.us - Is a link sharing social network where you can share links with notes and tags.  Can be useful across multiple industries and a nice way to add more content to your own blog/site (check out their widgets).
• Technorati - Started as a way to view news on tech blogs (hence the name) and see their ranking (as a function of how many other tracked blogs link to them) - is now used across many industries for an overview of what’s going on in the blogosphere.
• StumbleUpon - Has a fairly general audience who use the site to ’stumble upon’ new content that others have submitted.
• Newsvine - Started as a sort of portal with voting for content from news organization, it now accepts content from anywhere, but still heavily favors news websites.  May be worth a look for your business blog since you can also start your own column on the site.
• Sphinn - Targets Search & Internet Marketing Professionals.

As mentioned previously, it is also worth taking a look at industry websites to see if there are smaller niche social networks and communities in your own industry.

Need Help using Social Networks to Promote Your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

Now that you’ve done some thinking about what your business goals are for social networking and investigated where your target audience is…

What will be the reaction to your message?

If You’ll Be Joining Existing Communities…

If you’ve decided to use existing communities and social networks to connect with your audience, take care not to put them all off by posting about how great your company/products/services are.  You’ll need to approach social networking as a way to help your customers (which will also help you).  Start by answering questions and trying to be as helpful as possible.  If the community allows you a profile page - fill it out and post blog entries if possible.  Once you’ve established a reputation for being helpful, you can make some inquiries of the community (to try to accomplish some of your business goals), be they feedback, reviews, etc (obviously some goals won’t require any inquiries if they’re directed towards increasing sales & traffic).

If You’ll Be Starting Your Own Community…

Starting your own community is the most difficult way to go, but sometimes it is the only way to reach your intended audience.  You will need a fairly large time committment to post content (lots of it), market and champion your network.  If you can enlist the help of some fairly vocal customers, it will help your cause (in terms of both effort and reputation).  Since a large part of the initial content will probably be posted by you, again concentrate on helping your audience.  Post frequently asked questions (FAQs) with answers, blogs about what the company is doing, and information to help with your products and services.

Help Your Customers

Hopefully you’ve noticed the common thread: using social networks should be about helping your customers.  Helping them should lead to help for you and will give you a reputation for caring and listening when you need to ask them for assistance.

Other Posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business - What Are Your Goals?

Using Social Networks for Business - Where Are You?

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

Where are the people I’m trying to reach?

This is also an important question because there are a limited number of hours in the day and we need to put our efforts into what makes sense for our business.  Just because you heard about MySpace in the news doesn’t mean that your audience of roofing contractors is there or has even heard about it.  You’ll need to do a little research to find out where your audience is.

Here are some places to look:

• Start with publications focused at your audience - their websites often offer or link to a existing community.
• Look to see if there are dedicated groups on existing social networks (like Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc).
• Use Google to search for your industry name to see if any other websites have or link to a network.
• Try a blog search to find blogs (try Google Blog Search or Technorati) in your industry - they often have communities or link to them.
• Ask professionals in your industry if they know of any online communities.

If you still come up blank it may be that there isn’t a community for your industry (yet).  Before you run off to start your own community, it is also important to understand your audience.  Are they even online?  Do they just read websites or will they create content and join the conversation?  The Profile tool at the Groundswell site can help you understand the tendencies of your audience.

Other posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business - What Are Your Goals?

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

In the first post of this series, What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business Website?, I gave an overview of some questions you should ask (and try to answer) to decide which social networks are best for your business.  The first question, is the most important:

What goal or problem am I trying to solve?

It may help to take a look at some possible answers:

1. Increase Sales
2. Increase Traffic to the Website - Why?  This is a common answer, but what does more traffic give you?  One would hope you’re actually trying to increase sales (see #1).
3. Increase Customer Satisfaction - Good.  This should also lead to #1.
4. Need more information on how our products/services are doing.  - Also good (and should lead to #1 - see a trend?)

Businesses often lose sight of their main goal - to increase sales.  Don’t become bogged down with all these new technologies and buzz words.  If sales are hurting because you have a customer serice or research problem, then use social networks and your website to solve that problem.

Take a deep breath.  Visualize what you’re trying to do and why.  Now we have a good foundation to move forward.

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting