Love it or hate it but social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc.) now plays a very important part in the search ranking of your website. Because of the social media revolution and the huge popularity of facebook, search engines have changed how they rate websites. They now include how much a page is shared. For example, if a web page is shared on facebook and then friends of friends think it is good enough to share with their friends, the search engines will rank it higher. It must have great quality content and be very important to have been shared so many times.
The emphasis is still on having a well designed website with fresh quality content. But you also need to engage your potential customers through social media. As they interact with your website and link back to your facebook page to like it, it will appear in their facebook account. All this interactivity helps to lift your website in the search results. Sharing links on your Facebook page back to your website or your blog, and through twitter, puts your information out into the social media world where interested people can find it. It is good advertising for you, and provides a service for your customers that they can share it with their friends.
If you’re not sure where to start with social media, the main accounts that you should think about starting with are facebook, twitter and linkedin. Set up a facebook page for your business, add all the relevant information you can about your business and add links back to your website. Then go to your own website and add a ‘like’ button or ‘follow us on facebook’ button that links back to your website. You can do the same with twitter, sign up and create an account for your business, then add a twitter button to your own website so that people can follow you on twitter. You can start a linkedin account as well, but this works in a slightly different way as you would be setting up an account for you personally as an expert in your field.
You would need to do some research into what other social media accounts would benefit your business. For example, if you deal with music, having an account on myspace would be worthwhile. If you sell clothes for teenagers having share options for beebo would help you.
Once you have the relevant social media accounts you can start sharing links to your website, special offers that your business is running, links to your new blog posts and interesting information about products or your company. Do it regularly and you will create a following of people who are interested in what you do and are proud to share that interest with their friends. The status updates don’t need to be long, but updating once a day will keep your fans interested.
The other way of taking advantage of social media, is to add bookmarking tools to the pages of your website. Then your visitors can share the content of your website page on their own social media accounts. AddThis.com provide tools for you to do this easily, and they also provide a special plugin for wordpress if you are using that platform. The bookmarking/share buttons are different from the ‘follow us’ buttons that link to your own social media accounts. The share buttons allow the visitor to easily share your page in any of over 300 social media platforms. By using the addThis share buttons you certainly won’t miss out any of the social media accounts.
This is part fifteen of a twenty four part series of tips provided by cannedSunlight Web Design Costa Blanca to celebrate the run up to Christmas. You can view the other tips here: Tips 1-14, Tip 15. Come back tomorrow for further tips and advice on how to get a great website that works for you or your business.
