Social media integration

We're all familiar with the plethora of social media platforms available, or some of them at least. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more. But which, if any, are beneficial for your site? To be honest, any social media site which creates a link back to your site is good, and will, in all likelihood, drive some traffic your way.

So, should you have accounts on them all? Probably not. Many will not be relevant to your business, or even business. Not to mention the fact that, like blogging for your business, you need to regularly maintain each account - that's a lot of work to do it right!

Which social media platforms should a business use?

Ebiz MBA produces a list of the top 15 social media sites. You'll probably recognize, if not all, the majority of them. That's because they're big, and popular. For this reason alone, these are the ones who you should target. The 2 original "must-haves" were Facebook and Twitter, but, in recent years, businesses have also gotten great results across a number of other platforms - Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, & LinkedIn.

If your business is graphically intensive, then we recommend picking one or two of the image platforms - Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr - to share your content in addition to the 2 stalwarts. We also recommend you get together a good LinkedIn profile and include that too. Just remember that each of these needs a time investment.

I don't have time for all this - do you do it for us?

We add links to your webpages linking visitors to your social media profiles. And, for some platforms, we can install software on your site to automatically post to your social media platform (Facebook and Twitter make this easy). However, updating them manually with content (text and/or images) and actually building them, we leave to professionals who specialize in these areas. We work with a number of companies who can handle this for you. Ask us for a referral.

Is there really a need for it?

Yes. As the number of competitors for #1 on page 1 increases, the more you can do (or have someone else do) to gain visibility, the better. In the 1990s, when we first started website design, the competition was very low and just being on the web usually meant you were on page 1 if you did even an OK job on your site.

Now you need to use every avenue you can. Different groups of people - Baby Boomers, Gen Xs, Millennials - use the net in different ways. There's no "one way" to cover all your bases. This is why we recommend you get experts in each field to do the work for you, while you get on with being an expert in your field of work.