Manufacturers - How to Get Social NOW on Your Website

Start your exploration of social media techniques closest to home:  on your own website.  Try to think of your website as your social media hub.  The goal of everything else you do with social media should be to drive visitors back to your website.  Start making it into a place that people want to sit down and stay awhile.  (Or at the very least, read enough information that they understand what your company does and how it relates to them.)

Add Google Analytics to your website. Your IT person, or your website developer or host can easily add the code to your site that enables Google Analytics.  This will allow you to monitor how the changes you're making to your site and the other social media tactics you implement are affecting traffic to your website.  Google analytics is a powerful tool and it's FREE.  You can see where visitors are coming from; how long they're staying on certain pages; what keywords they use to find your site; and lots more.

Promote social media pages on your Home Page. If you already have a company Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media account, display it on your Home Page so people can quickly see your company is involved in social media and can link to your page.  If you don't already have these accounts set up, have no fear.  We're going to discuss setting up accounts in future posts.

If your company is small, use the "About" page to promote individual employee's social media profiles. Did you know the 2'nd most viewed page on any website is "About Us?"  After people get an idea of what you do on your Home Page, they usually go to "About Us" for more information.  People are naturally curious and they want more details about the people in your company and the history behind.  It helps to lower risk if they decide to contact you.  Ways you can make your "About" page more social:

• Add photos of key staff with direct email links and links to their social media profile pages, and this includes the president or CEO.
• Add short bios for each person that tell more about them than their function in the company.  Add a few tidbits of personal information as well.

If your company is too large for the previous suggestion, add a key employee directory page to your website.  Use the same concept as above, but omit the bios.  Just place a photo of each person with their title, email and social media profile links.

Add corporate (or individual) social media site profile links to key employees' email signatures. This is such a simple thing to do, and so few companies do it.  If your company has social media pages, every single employee's email signature should include them.  For individuals in the company who truly represent the company "brand," (CEO, president, VP's, marketing execs, engineering management) it can be helpful to include their individual profile links in their email signature.  Your company can have more than one "voice" representing it.  In fact, it can be very effective to have various key functions within the company represented through social media.  Your engineering manager is going to talk and network about completely different issues related to your business than your VP of sales.  They will each have a distinct group of followers that may be unrelated.  You can make each key employee in your company a social media marketer, each one driving traffic back to your website and/or blog. This is done quite successfully by larger corporations - there's no reason it can't translate to a small to medium size company as well.

Start an informative blog about your industry. This doesn't have to be an add-on to your website.  In fact, a large percentage of blogs are hosted separate from a company's website using online blogging software.   Your blog can be designed to look exactly like your website so it appears to be just another page of the site. If you don't host your own site, look into a hosted service like TypePad, Blogger, or LiveJournal.  All of these services are managed for you, so you never have to worry about technical issues.  Just focus on your blog's content and appearance. If you have Web hosting, consider a self-hosted package. Some of the most popular include MovableType, WordPress, and Textpattern.  Just keep in mind that these packages require someone in your company to perform installation and maintenance.  Some of these online platforms are free, others are not.  Check to see which one makes the most sense for your company. If your website needs an overhaul anyway, you may want to consider a site redesign that includes a content management system (CMS) with a blog component.  There are numerous benefits to blogging, which I've covered in other posts.  For now, just get your blog system set up and ready to go.

Be responsive to people! Nothing is more frustrating to me than commenting on someone's blog post and then never having that comment acknowledged - especially if I've asked a question!  Once you start blogging, someone MUST monitor your blog's activity and respond to each and every comment made.  If you're including links to employee's social media profiles, they need to be actively engaging on those social media sites.  Most important of all, if your company has "corporate" social media profiles, someone must constantly monitor activity on those sites and respond to any comments made. Socializing is a two way process.  Don't make the mistake of spewing forth self promotional quips and never actually engaging in meaningful conversation with your customers and prospects.

The same responsive etiquette should be shown with emails.  I find it amazing that so many people today totally ignore their emails.  If I were standing next to you and asked you a question, would you simply ignore me?  I think not; but this is often how people use email. I'm not talking about spammers, I'm talking about legitimate emails requesting information of some kind, or proposing some sort of collaboration.   If your company is going to be serious about social media marketing, every employee is going to have to become, well . . . more social.

All of your social media efforts should work together to create the image of a company that is responsive, helpful, communicative, and approachable.  Starting closest to home is the first step in creating that image.  Next post: How manufacturers can get social NOW on LinkedIn.