How to use Social Media (Facebook & Twitter) to promote your website
How to use Social Media to promote your site.
Firstly you need to make some accounts. Go to http://twitter.com/ and sign up for a new account in the name of your website or business.
Goto http://www.facebook.com/ and sign up for an account. This can be in your own name. Once done you can greate an official page for your business: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?campaign_id=372931622610&placement=pghm&extra_1=0
Add some photos and content and we have made a start! It is important that you make posts to both Twitter and Facebook most days, perhaps with information and reviews, latest offers, new directions, latest news whatever. Remember you are more likely to get more followers if you have high-quality and interesting content on your social media profiles than if you were tweeting purely self-promotional updates.
Now we need to start promoting the site through these social media. This is done in a number of ways.
1. Firstly we need to add buttons to your website to enable people to like. Share or Tweet you page to their friends and followers. The instructions for each of these can be found by following these links:
Facebook share button http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share
Facebook like buttton http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like
Twitter Tweet button http://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton
As well as the home page add the links to the contact us page so people know you will respond to contact made through these media.
2. Word of mouth: There is still a huge place for good old fashioned word of mouth advertising. Get friends, family, neighbours, employees to follow your Facebook and Twitter pages. People are more likely to follow pages that already have some sort of following, so your word of mouth promotion will help build your initial numbers.
3. Email: Send a friendly and personalized email to anyone you have a business relationship with, including partners, vendors, clients, and customers, letting them know about your social media profiles.
4. Email Signature: Add links to your company’s social media profiles to your company email signature. Create a signature template that includes these links. Ensure emplyees with email accounts do the same
5. Blog and forum comment signature: When you make a comment on a blog or forum link to Twitter or Facebook in your signature.
6. Paper and media advertising: Use your Facebook and Twitter links on all your corporate literature and stationary, business cards, flyers and handouts.
7. YouTube Videos: Create a You Tube profile and publish your appropriate corporate videos to You Tube. You can then embed the videos in your website. That way people can discover your YouTube page, and you have potential to benefit from YouTube’s viral nature.
You can also show You Tube videos in a lightbox popup or an iframe.
If you take the url in the title bar of the youtube page:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo
Change "watch?v=" for "v/"
http://www.youtube.com/v/_ve4M4UsJQo
Then add "?rel=0" at the end (removes related videos)
http://www.youtube.com/v/_ve4M4UsJQo?rel=0
you get a clean url for the video which you can use in a lightbox or iframe:
