Posts Tagged ‘integrate’

Integrating Social Media into Your Website

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

This is the first in a series of posts looking at how social media can be integrated into a website, what advantages it has and why you would do it for particular clients.

I recently put together a website which integrates a clients site requirements, with social media such as:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • YouTube

These posts are a summary of what I have learned along the way. They include a summary as possible of my thought process, planning and how I implemented the integration.

Why Integrate Social Media into a Site

There are many reasons why you might want to integrate social media into a site including:

  • To take advantage of existing community you have developed – This depends on whether you already have an active Facebook or Twitter following, for example. Taking advantage of these existing friends/followers can help drive traffic and interest in your site.
  • To improve the visibilty of your site to search engines – Often getting a new site in front of Google can be difficult. However, Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages are being spidered by Google all the time, so links from these sources will help get your site initially spidered. The other factor is that creating these pages will get you inbound links to your website which will help with your ranking. How much it helps, coming from a social media site, nobody knows, but I’m guessing that the more followers/fans you have the better, and the more specific your discussion the better.
  • To spread your content as widely as possible – One of the biggest problems I see is people with good content, but just not getting it out in front of their audience. By distributing your content as widely as possible you increase the chance that your content will be seen, your site linked to, and your product or service bought. This takes a bit of a leap of faith from marketers more used to control of their information stream, however structuring your content appropriately makes sure your name is out there, and that you are not annoying your readers/viewers.
  • Ease of use, for a client used to social media sites – I threw this one in there because it is increasingly the case that clients, who may not know how to drive a websites CMS system, do know how to use Facebook and Twitter. By integrating these into your site, the page stays current, Google spiders it more, and there is also often more topical interest from clients.

There are more reasons than I have here, but hopefully this will be enough to get you thinking!

Case Study

In the case I’m going to look at, my client is an actor, Frankie Oatway, who’s career has all of a suddenly taken off after a move from England to Australia. He is a big user of Facebook with quite a few followers, but had never had a website before and wanted to keep everything as simple to manage as possible.

As an actor he was looking to develop fans, but was also looking to show his work as widely as possible to attract casting agents and may potentially release short films on the web.

In this case it was very apparent that Frankie was the brand, he is full of life and a really nice approachable guy. Social media was the therefore key to get his content in front of as many people as possible along with links back to his site (ideally with a high ranking in Google, for his name) so that agents could find and contact him should they need to, and fans could just have a chat with him.

The next post covers how we decided which social media to use and how we should develop his site.

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