Corporate Web StrategyWeb Marketing ideas, tactics, trends and more….

The beauty about social media is not about the various ways you let your audience link your site to various social media channels, but more of how you use these social media channels effectively for your benefit.

If you think by putting Facebook, Twitter or Linked-in links on your site is adequate to count for social media presence, you need to think again. Social media is no longer just about the ability to be able to share your site’s content with others.

Social media is about interaction – having a personality behind that social media account and be able to interact with your customers via social media. It means expanding your corporate presence beyond your website. It also means taking your customer’s opinion seriously, and being wiling to take and act on open negative criticism.

So, to integrate social media as part of your web strategy, these are the five things you’ll need:

1)   Set up social media accounts and assign someone to actively interact with your target audience

Your Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and company sponsored blogs have to be regularly updated and maintained. Someone needs to be assigned to build and maintain interactions, updates and build relationships with your target audience.

Use these social media channels to give updates to your audiences, organize competitions or activities as product education or promotion initiatives, or just to respond to reactions to customers’ comments about your company.

2)   Utilize social media analytics to measure progress

In order to determine how effective your strategy is, you need to be able to measure the performance of your social media efforts. Unlike web statistics that can be easily measured, social media require deeper listening and analytics tools to filter out the noise, and decipher what really matters.

Through information gathered, you are then better equipped to address the online buzz going about your company, respond to your customer’s thoughts and comments, or even to turn an unfavourable scenario to a positive one.

3)   Ensure that traffic is directed between your social media accounts and your corporate website

There has to be cross linkages between your website and your social media accounts. Doing this right is also crucial, in order to gain the maximum benefits of cross linking, and to ensure that you are not unnecessarily directing your audience out of your website.

Read Evolution of Social Media Integration and Corporate Websites on the benefits and disadvantages of various ways to link out of your website to your social media pages.

4)   Actively run promotion campaigns via social media – get your target audience involved

To jumpstart your fan base and followers, you first need to attract your audiences. This means, that you build as many incoming links to your social media pages – over email signatures, on your corporate website, getting your staff to be fans, or promoting it through various offline media (if you have the budget), such as radio and press releases.

Rather than just getting people to “like” your page, you could encourage participation and create hype by running a contest over social media. For instance, Canon Cameras ran a EOS photography competition over Facebook and cross promoted this over their corporate website.

With an activity, you then have more reason to create publicity and to spin a story around your social media activities.

5)   If you have the resources, introduce customer service and support via social media

Some companies go the extra mile by extending their customer services support via social media. This is indeed the next level in interacting with the customers, but allows for more transparency in these interactions.

However, adequate tracking and monitoring systems as well as guidelines need to exist to ensure that customer service executives act within their boundaries, and that the management is able to keep track of all such interactions.