What Is The Relationship Between Websites, Blogging And Social Media?
As talked about in our previous post ‘If I have a Facebook and Twitter do I still need a Website’, we believe that having a good website that works alongside your social media activity is important. The same goes for a Blog – it is a tool that sits within your online offerings and all three should work together…
The objective of any online activity for any organisation should be to promote the organisation in a good light and engage with customers, to the aim of increasing business.
The Website
A website is, in general, a static part of the online offering. It is there to provide information quickly and easily and can have many pages and layers to get across complex information. If any business wants to be taken seriously they need to have a good, easy to find and navigate, website that they can link back to. It is the equivalent of your shop window in the digital world..
The Blog
Blogging is becoming a popular way for individuals and organisations to communicate regularly with their customers, often pushed through social media channels. Ideally a blog would sit as part of a website as it gives you an nice area that can be regularly updated with news, opinion and articles that add value to you customers/followers (potential customers). Regularly publishing to a blog helps with Search Engine Optimisation, establishing a reputation in the digital world and engaging through social media.
Social Media
Your social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) are networking communities that you are part of. There are many ways to communicate and engage on all three as talked about in our previous posts ‘Top tops to getting the most from Twitter’ and ‘Top tips to getting the most from LinkedIn’. As well as this though, they thrive on linking back to sources of wider information – your website or blog. They help with driving traffic to your blog and website and with Search Engine Optimisation.
In the end all these online tools are there to be used for communication. They are all slightly different in the way they do it, but by having a cohesive digital marketing strategy they can all work alongside each other to promote your organisation in the digital world.
One cap doesn’t fit all in social media marketing
It’s all too easy for businesses to get caught up in this ‘social media’ thing and get themselves set-up on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms without really thinking about their objectives and having a strategy.
Social media marketing is just like any other form of marketing – it needs to have clear, measurable objectives and be bedded into the overall marketing strategy of the organisation.
The kind of questions you need to ask yourself are:
Who am I trying to engage with?
What messages to I want to get out to them?
What do I want to achieve from my efforts?
If you are a large brand with wide reach who wants to engage with consumers then a Facebook page is probably right for you. However, if you are a small, local company operating in quite a specialist are then you might be better concentrating your efforts into Twitter.
I would recommend that anyone who is already operating in the world of social media and doesn’t have a clear strategy sits back and assesses their activity to make sure they are getting the most out of what they are doing.
After all, time is money as they say!
Getting started in social networking and not getting disheartened..
There are a lot of people who think they are ‘doing’ social media by setting themselves up on Twitter and Facebook, adding a few contacts and sharing a few posts, then losing heart because they don’t feel that they are getting anything back.
I would say it takes a good couple of months to grow your network organically and start to build relationships with those people on your network through carefully thought out messages.
Social networking is much like face-to-face networking. It is hard at the start because you don’t know anyone and it all feels a bit uncomfortable, but once you have been a few times you start to build up a network of contacts, who then become customers/suppliers/clients, and your net widens with each visit.
The same principles apply to social or on-line networking. Twitter and Facebook are merely tools that need to be used properly to build up a good quality, reliable network of people that are easy to communicate with and, once trust is built, become customers.
It is all about relationship building. There is no quick fix but with a little time and patience your contacts on Twitter and Facebook could become your most valuable resources.
Social media is just an extension of your brand…
From the many conversations I have about social media one thing is apparent, that it still seems like a scary other world to most people.
This is a shame because using it for business is a great way of getting information and messages out and engaging with customers and other businesses.
Social media is just another medium in which to spread your message and also, in the opposition to more traditional forms of marketing, engage in conversation with your audience.
However, it is important that all ‘posts’, ‘tweets’ and/or ‘status updates’ must reflect and reinforce the organisations brand. This is why I would recommend that any brand that is thinking of dipping its toe into the world of social media marketing, or already has a presence there, seriously considers putting in place some kind of strategy or hiring a social media agency.
Yes, it is widely thought that the best thing to do to get started is get set-up and start posting/tweeting/following but if you aren’t following the right people or putting out the right messages you could, potentially, be damaging your brand’s reputation.
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