Social eOptimized Blog

As you develop a successful Social Media Marketing strategy, consider how this strategy integrates with your website. In today’s business world, your website and your social media marketing strategy are messengers that carry your marketing message. However, in order for your online presence to effectively convey this message, every component must work together in unison. This requires bolting these pieces of your strategy together to form a seamless marketing tool.

Not About You!

Create the opportunity for the consumer to access your company content through their channel of choice, whether this is your website or the social media channels you develop that link back to your website. Consider your social media channels the windows into your website that provide accessibility to discount offers, news and information for those communities where you establish ongoing conversations. By creating this linkage, you establish your website as the destination and your social media channels as the conversation for your prospects and customers.

The destination is a place your customers go when they have a specific reason to do so (make purchases, sign up for a new program, review a new product, etc.). As a destination, your customers only visit when they have a specific need that can be satisfied on your website. The conversation can happen every day and allows you to build a relationship with your users, all the while giving you an opportunity to direct your contacts back to the destination (your website) – but only as necessary and every once in a while.

As user-friendly as your website may be, there are only a limited number of ways for people to interact with your company website (online forms, purchase products, download whitepapers, etc.). Visitors to your website come to find specific information or to take a specific action that once completed generally has them leaving the website in pursuit of their next informational need. However, your social media program provides 24/7 access to everyone and anyone who connects to your social media channels. In fact, it gives them your information on demand, when and where they want it.

Do You Need a Website?

Can a company be successful with only a social media presence and no website? Your website provides authority and a face to your business, whereas your social media channels provide an informal method of connecting with your prospects and customers. Most likely, any company not taking advantage of a website is making it very difficult to convert their social conversation into a tangible transaction and therefore experiencing only limited success online.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing please feel free to call or email, WSI is hear to help.

OK so we know the reason why online marketing is a must is because we can measure the effectiveness of everything we spend hard earned marketing dollars on. Social Media Marketing has proven to be a strong component of a businesses marketing strategy but are you effective measuring your results to work smarter?

There are a number of online sources for information on Social Media Measurement and your ROI (return on investment). ROI will always be the standard to measure the ultimate success, but many other metrics available can provide you with information if you are on the right track with your strategy.

Social Media Measurement ideas

Communities: The easiest and the first to track is building online communities on various social media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Traffic: To track traffic is also easy and you can use Google Analytics and Bit.ly (shorten URL service) for this.

Conversations: A key statistic you can track is how well your online communities respond and engage with your efforts. You can track the number of engagement on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can check how many likes and comments you received on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, and discussions taking place on LinkedIn.

Leads: If you want to track sales leads, you will have to implement some sort of tracking results. You can use specific campaign forms, lead tracking phone numbers, tracking URL’s, or you can simply ask the people that contacts you how they found you. These are just a couple of the tracking methods available.

If you have trouble tracking your Social Media Marketing efforts, try using our methods above to measure your your efforts. Remember that at the end of the day, the only true measurment is your ROI!

Social Media Marketing is the hottest new marketing concept and every business owner wants to know how Social Media can generate value for their Barrie business.

People are social by nature and collect or share information that is important to them. Social Media Marketing is about understanding how technology is making it easier for people to connect socially with their social networks and how your Barrie business can profit from that understanding. More and more of your customers, whether for personal use, business-to-consumer or business-to-business reasons use social media in every aspect of their daily life.

The Use of Social Media Continues to Grow

The use of social media has dramatically grown and is not limited to just younger generations. Although, younger generations have a very high percentage of users, older users have begun to integrate social networking into their daily lives. The U.S. has experienced a significant growth of social media use with nearly half of online adults ages 50-64 and one-in-four seniors (65+) with access to the Internet now considering themselves as regular users of Facebook and LinkedIn. However, these older users (50+) continue to have a heavy reliance on email as their primary contact tool.

More People Are Using Social Networks in Canada

The social network population is rising steadily with $16.1 million people on social networks in 2011, which is 62% of all Canadian Internet users. Next year, 64% of the online population will become social network users (16.9 million)
By 2014, 18.4 million people (68% of all Internet users) will be on social networks.

So it is obvious Social Media is not going away so here is the big questions, how are you going to stand out and embrace the Social Media Marketing and Social Networks for your business?