It’s critical to the success of your branding and online presence to integrate your social media platforms with your web site. Enabling you to leverage your overall outbound marketing costs and processes.

Before we dive in to enabling your web site for social media platforms and profiles make sure these website attributes are all systems go:

• Google Analytics is installed for tracking and optimizing.
• Content is current, accurate and search engine optimized.
• Site Navigation is clear; visitors can easily move around within your web site, contact and engage with your brand.
• You have calls to action are in place: Blog sign up, Newsletter, Product/Services Promotions, etc.
• Load times have been tested and all web site digital touchpoints work well. WooRank has a superb website analysis and reporting tool which is one of the best in the industry with a free and paid version.
• Web site content should be updated frequently to drive downstream search rankings and visitor engagement - your Blog will do this job nicely.
• Many visitors (admittedly geekier types) still use Google’s RSS Reader to stay abreast of what’s happening with your Blog; make sure this is working properly by setting up and testing your account via Feedburner.

Social Enabling your WebSite

1) Install Social Media Images in a prominent position that is resident in your universal menu structure (shows up on all pages). Make sure these are “above the fold” - don’t do you much good if icons are not showing up at the top of each page in a prominent position.

2) If you have a YouTube account them you should also embed your videos with the web site - leveraging your content development costs and driving deeper engagement with your visitor. There are a ton of YouTube widgets that make this pretty easy to do. Click here for a deeper dive (previous blog) on video marketing.

3) Integrate your Blog closely with your web site via menus, links, mentions and references. My web site is built around my blog - in fact we tossed out our old design and went with a Genesis Framework template by Studio Press as the primary platform for the site.

• Blogging is at times getting thrown under the bus for the sexier/shinier new tools like Twitter and Facebook. A Blog should be the cornerstone of your social media marketing activities - it does so many powerful things for your online presence: content refreshment, brand engagement, drives  incremental SEO results and can be repurposed across the social web.
• I don’t recommend using standalone third party web sites like Tumblr, Posterous, Google’s Blogger or niche vendors for vertical industries. If you want to use them as add on sites for republishing your blog, this may be okay, although you have to think about duplicate content issues.
• It’s critical to own, control and manage your own content and the benefits of having a WordPress blog integrated with your web site far outstrip using third party sites.
• Don’t forget to embed your Blog with your social media platforms; LinkedIn enables you to do this in a couple of minutes. Every Blog post should be syndicated across your social media accounts.

4) Enable visitors to share your website content with the social web; i.e. Likes (Facebook), ReTweets (Twitter) using plugins for the respective social media platforms. This makes your site more interactive with the visitor (driving engagement) and helps to extend your content across the social web.

5) Extend your brand and web site content across the social web by setting up accounts via SlideShare and Scribd (industry leaders), After you’ve created an account with both sites you can easily embed a widget with our site and also embed your SlideShare account via LinkedIn account.

6) There are a large number of content publishing and bookmarking web site available to you. Market leaders are StumblUpon, Digg (although facing some challenges of late), Reddit - Ping.FM (now owned by Seesmic), and OnlyWire are aggregate sites that enable you to update all of your social bookmarking sites at once.

If you have thoughts, questions or digital bon mots we’d love to connect with you via our Comments below.