How To Link & Streamline Your Website, Blog and Social Media Accounts So They Work Together
So…… you have a website, you have a blog (either integrated with your website, or separate), you have social media accounts; a Facebook page, Twitter account, a LinkedIn profile and business page, a Google+ page, Pinterest, Instagram etc.
Many business owners take the trouble to set up their accounts and pages, but then find that they don’t have the time to spend keeping them all up to date.
In terms of priorities its very important to keep adding new content to your website and if you have an integrated blog then it’s the easiest way of regularly adding new content that search engines love to see.
The issue for many is that they then need to add new posts to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc to keep them active. All of this takes time and effort, not to mention the work required to keep thinking of new, interesting and unique topics to write about.
The solution is to link all of your social media with your blog, so one new piece of content is instantly syndicated across all your social channels with the click of a button, reducing the time it requires to keep all of your channels current and actively managed.
Social links to your Blog Posts
The additional benefit of writing one blog post and automatically sharing it on your social media accounts is that you will also create a direct link from your social channels back to your blog post, so each social post will be a snippet of the main blog post, followed by a link to the post on your blog.
Your social media followers, fans and friends can then click to visit your post and then they can proceed through to more related info, make and enquiry etc.
Social media should be used to find potential customers, and steer them into your main website, via your blog. Your website should be structured to make sales, generate enquires and build your business, everything else is in essence just a ‘doorway’ into your website for interested visitors, who find you through search, social, video, paid ads, emails, print media etc.
Once set up, your blog posts can automatically publish to all of your social media accounts. There are many ways to implement this automation, for instance, WordPress users can use Jetpack or one of the many plugins to link all of their social media accounts and post snippets on autopilot.
Alternatively, you can set your Facebook account to post to Twitter automatically when you post, or vice versa.
Blog & Website Share Buttons
The other blogging essential is to include sharing buttons on every web page and blog post you publish…… your aim is to encourage your visitors to share your posts and pages with their social media followers…… this process will open up your content to potential customers that you don’t know yet.
For WordPress we favour Cresta Pro as our Share Button Plugin of choice, but there are many others available.
Social Media & SEO
Google look to social media to help assess your page content. If real people share your content with their friends online then it provides Google with a strong indicator that your content is liked by your audience…… and more importantly, is liked enough for them to want their contacts to see it.
In general terms, junk content isn’t shared that often, but really good content is, so the more shares you have, and the more of those people share it again, the more Google will value your content.
Additional Resources:
See How does social media help SEO
More about Social Media Marketing