Online marketing

Becoming Shareable – Let the People Talk!

Enjoy this guest post by Ben ~

Social media has become an essential part of web promotion. Not only is it effective and helpful for increasing the popularity of your business or website, but it is absolutely necessary! Proper use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook will not only help your site gain exposure, but it will act as a catalyst for making your content more prominent and even viral.

The easiest and most important step to take when stepping into the “social” scene is adding buttons to your site to help visitors share your content. In other words, make your website “shareable” because the last thing you want to do is inhibit their ability to advertise your business for you. People love to communicate and we also love to share. Social media is the Internet’s analogy for word-of-mouth advertising. Neglecting to add buttons on your site for visitors to share your content is a lot like stripping them of their voice – let them talk!

TweetMeme is a fantastic tool for making your content very shareable. It adds a simple button at the top (or bottom) of all of your posts that people can use to tweet your content with literally 2-clicks. A common trend you will notice when observing popular sites in almost every niche is the overwhelming amount of tweets in comparison to “likes” on Facebook. Tweeting is easier and faster, and in an online world where we skim almost everything we read, we need to have quick sharing options for our visitors.

A common and effective layout for making your site easy to share is to include a button at the top of every post for Twitter and/or Facebook, a set of buttons at the bottom for a few popular social sites, and also the presence of similar sharing buttons consistently displayed on your sidebar. For the sidebar, the most important inclusions are Twitter, Facebook, and your RSS Feed. You might have other sites like LinkedIn that you like to use or a series of videos on YouTube – these would be good additions for your sharing buttons.

To further emphasize the importance of properly using social media, lets cover a scenario:

Someone visits your site and reads an article. They really like it, but they don’t see any sharing buttons and so it may not even cross their mind to tweet it or like it, so they move on with their day.
This same visitor comes to your site and reads the same article. However, this time there are social sharing buttons featured prominently on the page. This visitor tweets the post and it is quickly exposed to all of this user’s followers (dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people).

And it doesn’t stop there. The people who see that tweet might tweet it too, they might look through your site and tweet another post, or they might follow you on Twitter and become exposed to all of your new tweets. Simple processes like this can quickly multiply and expand upon your daily traffic, and all of this happens simply because you have made your website shareable.

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I love friends! I love meeting new friends and getting to know them and how I might be able to help them in some way. I really do. But I wouldn’t just walk up to a stranger and say, “Hey, I want to be your friend! I don’t know you or really anyone else you know personally, but you look like someone that I would want to connect with!” Seriously!

So why do people do that online? I get friend requests daily from people I don’t know and they NEVER indicated why they want to be connected with me. At least a small message saying, I’m a friend of Joe’s and he thought we might be able to help each other in business. Or something!

Many of my online friends feel the same way and basically “ignore” those requests. If we don’t know you personally or you don’t write a small note telling us why you want to be friends, then chances are….it won’t happen.

I don’t think people really get the concept yet of Facebook. Your personal profile (where you have friends) is intended for people you personally know and your family. Thus the name…Personal Profile! The Fan Page is intended to have people who you might not know personally, but have an interest in your business or the products and services you sell. I would love to have more folks join me on my Fan Page (psst, here’s the link Online and Social Media Training) I would never turn you way, unless you were being rude or obnoxious.

It’s just common courtesy as my friend Kathleen Gage said on my Facebook wall during a recent discussion. When you are requesting to be someone’s friend on Facebook there is a little section in the lower left corner to Add a personal message.

As Nike says, Just Do It! Remember online social networking is first and always about building a relationship. You can’t build a relationship with people you don’t know.