Thursday 14 April 2016

3 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is as important as SEO in this day and age. A third of millennials say they prefer to communicate with businesses via social media. So you need to optimize your website for social media marketing. The first mistake you should never make is viewing your website and your social media channels as mutually exclusive parts.
Yes, social media can help you meet your B2B sales quota, but this only happens when you combine your SEO efforts with your social media efforts. And that involves optimizing your website. This guide is going to show you some of the things you have to do in order to get ready for social media marketing.
Connecting with Social Media
In order to generate B2B business leads through LinkedIn, you can’t just operate on LinkedIn. You must form a clear path between this social media network and your website. Including your website in the bio of your profile is relatively simple, but not a lot of companies use their website to link back to their social media accounts.
Such a simple change can make a huge difference.
Display these links prominently and don’t just install a sharing bar at the bottom of your page. This may require some additional add-ons or some more coding, but it’s well worth the effort in the long-term. There are plenty of tools that will allow you to do the same thing.
For example, WordPress comes with a range of third-party add-ons that will do this for you automatically. You want it to be easy for users to get from social media to your website and your website to social media. You also want to make it easy for them to share content from your site to their social media feeds.
Begin with the basics here. Facebook and Twitter are two essential social media networks, but then you have to look into other platforms. See what LinkedIn and Pinterest can do for your business.
Provide Regular New Content
You likely already know that you have to provide new and unique content on a consistent basis for SEO reasons. This is just as important on social media, though, because you always need something new to share. You have to give people a reason to actually come to your blog.
For example, the new generation of business leaders view philanthropy as an essential marketing tool because it’s a type of content that attracts people. Sometimes they involve themselves in such efforts just to generate this new and relevant content.
In order to perform at your best on both platforms you need to go further than writing a simple blog post with a few images. Change up your content and make it as varied as possible. Other forms of content will improve the user experience and allow you to rank for more keywords.
Use video marketing for maximum effect in this day and age. It takes up the most real estate on both Google and social media. Plus, it’s been shown time and time again that videos are far more engaging, particularly to mobile users. The only downside is this type of great content takes more effort to actually create.
Make Your Content Interactive
You may notice that nothing so far has include anything to do with the technical SEO aspects. This is because they come in a distant second to the user experience. A positive user experience will always do far more for you than stuffing lots of keywords in your content.
Give people a reason to view your website and signup to it via interactive content. Social media should be the start of your sales funnel, whereas your website takes the customer relationship to the next level. Rather than forcing visitors to go through long registration or purchasing processes, allow people to register via their social media accounts.
Popular commenting platforms like Livefyre and Disqus allow people to just sign in with their Facebook profiles. This will improve your visibility because any comments are going to be representative of both website and social media popularity, both at the same time.
Plus, many of these comments will be seen by friends on social media, so it’s likely to generate even more comments as well.
Conclusion
Generating popularity in both SEO and social media terms are connected to each other. You can’t treat them as two separate things. These three tips have shown you how you have to go about doing it.
So how are you going to be successful today?

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