Is Your Web Site Trumped By Social Media?
You’ve got your company’s Facebook page setup and you are staying on top of your tweets. Maybe you even updated your LinkedIn profile this week. That’s great. But how much attention is your web site getting? It seems that the more marketing resources you put into keeping up with your company’s social media endeavors, the less attention your web site gets. And isn’t your web site the core of your online brand experience?
If not kept up, your site and its content will eventually become stale and out of sync with your ever-evolving marketing initiatives. This is especially unfortunate if you consider how much time and energy was expended piecing that web site together in the first place. Between perfecting the design, writing content, compiling imagery, and then combing through the lot of it to ensure that the end result is fully SEO compliant and exactly what you need, it was a herculean effort to get that site built. Wasn’t it? Isn’t it then a huge waste if you didn’t continue to refresh and refine your web site with new content that keeps it alive and relevant?
Why does the freshness of your content matter? Two reasons: search engines and by extension, site visitors. The more content you have in your site with topics, keywords, and site references pertinent to – and keeping pace with – the goings on in your industry, the higher your search rank is likely to be. Of course, the higher your ranking, the more visitors are likely to come and sift through your site and hopefully value it as a resource. This is especially important if you hope to garner business leads through your web site.
Ok. So how can we spruce things up without reinventing the wheel or over extended our already scant resources? One of the simplest ways is to maintain a news section on your site. The articles don’t need to be long, just a few sentences will do. Use this section to announce a big contract award or your company’s most recent hirings and promotions. You could even post announcements listing upcoming trade shows that you plan to attend. If configured correctly, not only would these updates appear on a news page, but you could have them automatically display on the home page as well as various other places within the site. You could even post industry news that is pertinent to your company. If the site is built dynamically – allowing content generated within the news section to appear on ancillary pages within the site, with one news update you will have essentially added new content to 60-70% of the pages in your site.
So what about those Tweets and Facebook status updates? There are apps for that. Seriously, though there are a ton of widgets and plugins out there that can be easily and painlessly integrated into your home page or internal pages, so that your status updates can be instantly beamed into your site. The obvious advantage here is efficiency; by updating your status you are also updating your site, killing two, or even three birds if you use an application like TweetDeck to sync your Twitter and Facebook status updates.
A slightly more ambitious endeavor would be to start a blog and integrate it with your existing site architecture. Although it may at first seem a little daunting, the upkeep of a blog can be really simple. Much like the news section example above, you could have your latest post automatically display on the home page of your web site, ensuring that its content stays fresh. The posts could be as short or as long as you like. Just like the news section, you could use the blog to post company updates and event announcements, but you are not limited to those topics. You have the freedom to tailor the content however you like. You can write brief reactions to industry news or publish a six part manifesto. It’s up to you.
Whatever you decide to do, the key is to find an online marketing solution that you can sustain. Ideally that would probably mean some kind of blend of all of the approaches mentioned here, with your primary website being the centerpiece that all of the other media to feed off of. So, if your web page is as stale as MySpace, what’s the point in all the other social media updating you’re ravenously cranking away at?
