How Your Website and Social Media Are a Team
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/55qqVZZKUqkfcixTk1Dqom
When I’m on Facebook, probably more than I should be, I often see companies with a booming social presence. They’re posting about events that they’ve put on, client testimonials, upcoming sales or discounts, live streams, promo videos or commercials, pictures from their clients — they get it! And they’re clearly getting results.
Then I get curious because of the business I’m in and hop over to their site. I’m usually met with a website that hasn’t had any action since it was built. It has actually made me wonder if this is even the same company I’m looking at. There is so much lost potential here and we want to help you help yourself.
Your website and social media presence are supposed to work together. They have two different and important jobs, and when one is trying to do the work of both it’s usually sloppy, a little confusing, and is greatly missing out on a lot of great content that will help increase their search rankings. You’ll get better results and online traffic by using them together. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by only being active on one of them.
First, we’re going to talk about their purposes and intentions so the connection of the two will make more sense:
Your Website’s Purpose
First of all, a website is not a marketing strategy. Whatsoever. You don’t ‘calculate the ROI’ on a website. The simple fact that you have a website does not mean clients will magically start finding you online. But it is the most important ingredient for all of your marketing tactics to plug into and direct clients to.
Think of it as the main hub of information where you’re pointing all of your marketing funnels.
Radio ads? End the ad telling people to visit your website.
Newsletter? Create that newsletter content on your site, and in the email newsletter, include a couple of sentences to grab their attention and then link back to your site if they want to view the whole post.
You do want to make sure your website is able to receive and convert traffic first before you tell people to go there. Directing potential clients to your website from other marketing funnels when your website isn’t even set up to convert users into clients defeats the purpose. First make sure your website is setup correctly, THEN focus on your marketing funnels. At the least, your website should display:
- what you do
- a call to action
- contact information and how to get a hold of you
You want clients and potential clients to view your site as the source of truth, so that’s the place that you need to direct them to. Not only that, if you have Google Analytics setup you can accurately analyze the traffic that is coming to your site and can even start to predict patterns and use it to determine what marketing funnels are working the best.
But Why Is My Website the Main Hub?
Why you say? Why not just tell everyone to go to your Facebook page or to just email or call you?
1) Your website is the only platform that you have complete control over. It’s YOURS. Sure, Facebook may be great for building an audience but you can go from thousands of interactions one day to a handful the next; all because Facebook decided to change their algorithm overnight and now you’re left to figure out how it works. 2) You want to be sticky. Give them a dedicated place they can always go to if they have questions, want to learn more about you, see the latest news about your company and of course, contacting you. If you give them an email or phone number, what if you decide to change it one day? What if they just all together forget your number? Answer this; is a string of random numbers easier or harder to remember than a domain name?
Make your life easier and just give them your website URL.
And let’s be real; it’s much more professional to have a website listed on your business card than a Facebook link.
Your Social Media’s Purpose
This is one of many marketing funnels you can use to get traffic to your website. The most common misconception that businesses make when posting on social media is thinking it needs to be all about selling. Wrongo. Incorrect. People want a community, they want to laugh, they want to have fun!
When you’re scrolling on your Facebook, do you enjoy being sold to? Do you quickly go and follow that page that’s desperately trying to get you to buy their latest product?
No. So why are you doing it?
The purpose of your social presence is to build the personal connection with your clients. I recently saw a post that was getting a lot of interactions. All they did was follow a trend and it got a ton of shares and views. This is all their post said, “She’s a 10, but has to get iced coffee every morning.” and it was posted by some coffee stand’s Facebook page. They didn’t add anything at the end saying to come in and try their coffee; they didn’t need to. Everyone KNOWS they’re a coffee stand; they don’t need to repeat it. By following a trend that their main target audience knows of was a killer move on their part. Clearly.
So, your social media isn’t to sell people. You can inform them, but we are so done with those 80’s selling tactics. People want to be able to relate to you, to see the genuineness, and to have a good laugh. Don’t make it too complicated!
Teamwork
Here’s how to use them together:
- That thing that you were about to post on your Facebook or Instagram? You’re actually going to first post it to your website.
(Don’t already have a ‘Blog’ or ‘News’ section? Don’t think you even have content for a section like that? I bet you do. Check out our other post ‘You Should Be Blogging – Here’s How’ for a deeper dive.) - After publishing your website post, copy the post link and now go to your social media page.
- Create a social media post, share a couple of sentences from the website post to grab attention, drop the initial post link from your site and publish!
Not only are you still posting on social media like you were before, but you’re cleaning it up by moving your story-long posts to your website where they should be. You’re also now treating it like a newsletter list that people can scan and if they’re really interested, they can click the link to read your full article back on your own site.
Our Challenge
I dare you to check out your website analytics now, make these tweaks and implement this new way of posting for a year and then check your analytics again. If you start seeing an increase in your traffic, then you are definitely on the right path.