Don’t forget your website when talking about conversations

I was happy with the results from the Altimeter social media study among professionals. When they asked for the key external priority, marketers answered: website integration. They mean integrating their website with their other social presence.

The last years, we were so busy talking about Facebook and Twitter that we almost forgot our website. Strange, as most companies have loads of site traffic every month. At InSites Consulting, we have conducted thousands of website analyses. One of my key conclusions is that most branded websites have a very largenumber of first time visitors. In most cases, more than half of the visitors are first timers. You could say that’s great, but I see it as a missed opportunity:

• When people visit your site, it means they have interest in your category and probably your brand.
• Even stronger, most visitors of branded sites are really involved with the brand.
• Even with this strong relation towards the brand, people hardly come back. Why? Because they just don’t think about it or see the need.

So integration of your site with social media is just a nobrainer and should be indeed a priority for all companies. A few very basic tips & tricks you can use:

• Try to ‘capture’ these visitors and guide them to a place where it becomes easier to build a relation with them. Adding a ‘become our friend on Facebook’ button is pretty easy, but also necessary. It gives fans and interested people the opportunity to connect with the brand. You as marketer can keep in touch. For ideas on how to use Facebook in building a relation, check out Polle De Maagt his slidedeck about this:

• Make it easy for visitors to share your content with their network. If people can easily tell others about your site, traffic of the site will boost.
• See your website more as a newsroom instead of a brochure. Look at all successful sites, they all have some editorial team to bring new and appealing content to the site. Check out this website of Scania, a B2B transportation business. They changed their site into a newsroom to better connect with their visitors.