4.8 Social Media Integration
Smaller companies may find it more convenient to have one person running their website and all of their social media accounts, but most medium or larger enterprises will have a full team that manages their website, and another that leads social media strategy. These are often situated in a marketing or communications office. Both the web team and the social media communication teams need to interact and communicate regularly so that the website and social media accounts have consistent messaging, tone and usability.
Web Teams
Front-end developers
A front-end developer is someone who works on the style and design of a website. These developers need to know HTML, CSS and usually be comfortable with JavaScript. Other web programming languages that are often desired for front-end developers are jQuery, Angular JS, and Polymer Web Components (to name just a few).
More specifically, front-end designers are often called UX (User Experience) Designers. Having the ability to wire-frame or create sample website layouts in a graphics imaging software such as Gimp or Photoshop is an asset to this position.
Back-end developers
Back-end developers are more in-depth programmers who add dynamic functionality to a website. For example, they would be needed on a team for websites that have any user login, e-commerce database, server-side forms, etc. These developers enhance websites by using programming languages such as JavaScript (or node), PHP, MySQL, Java as well as complete knowledge of the most current CSS and HTML to build more advanced functionality into the website.
Marketing/Communications Teams
Copywriter
A copywriter is often the person who is responsible for creating the web content (blogs, snappy intro text, etc.) and making sure that copyright laws are not being broken. This individual usually works closely with both the Communications Team and the Web team.
Social Media Manager
The Social Media Manager is in charge of creating, maintaining and executing the social media strategy. They are at the centre of managing a company’s online presence and should have excellent leadership skills, writing and editing capabilities, and advanced knowledge of web analytics. Other titles for this position might include social media strategist, social media coordinator, or digital communications strategist.
Social Media Assistant
The social media assistant is typically the individual responsible for posting to social media and maintaining the voice of the company on all social platforms. The strategy will be determined by the social media manager and the assistant(s) will be in charge of ensuring the execution of the campaigns, and following up with customer comments and complaints. The social media assistant needs to have excellent written and oral communication skills and be able to effectively multi-task numerous projects and expectations from the team. They are often responsible for delivering reports to the manager on the success of various campaigns and more specifically, on the ROI of each micro-action.
Graphic Designer
An in-house graphic designer can be an invaluable asset for a business and often seen as a luxury. As the web becomes more and more emoji and image-centric, clear, clean graphics are more and more in demand. Online solutions such as fiverr and logo tournament are significantly lowering the bar for entrepreneurs to access high-quality graphics.
In fact, these two websites claim to provide you with the same services as a local graphic design company at significantly lower prices. The market, however, is still relatively split between local companies who invest time and dedicate their expertise to continued support, versus individual purchasing of graphics online. Plus now with digital tools such as Photoshop Online Tools, Photopea, Canva (to name a few), it seems like just about anyone with some design sense can try creating an attractive call-out image banner.
Once your social media plan is solid and adopted across your company, social media accounts can be integrated within your website.
Bridging Your Website and Social Media Accounts
Creating meaningful content for your website is essential, but if it is not publicized (usually by sharing across social media networks), the only way it will be seen is if people know to go to your website for it, or it gets picked up by a search engine. Social media posts that link back to your main website can help draw people to your content and to your business’ services.
The first step to integrating your social media accounts and website is to add links from your social media accounts to your site and vice-versa. Adding social media icons is reasonably simple to do within a variety CMS (content management systems) like WordPress.com.
Adding links to related posts, in-line with the body of the text on your website, can also result in a higher share rate on your blog. In reality, it is a circular process, link from your social media posts to your website and your website to your various social media accounts. This allows your visitors to enter into the loop at any point and get access to both your other social media posts and your site content.
For example, if one of your social media campaigns uses a contest, it might be useful to have a supporting page on your website that outlines prizes, expectations, and rules for participation. You can then link to this web page in your contest post.
Evaluating Your Content’s Lasting Value
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is when you design your web and social media content to be worthwhile for years to come. This allows your posts to get more clicks over time. To do this, avoid the use of specific dates/time (e.g., here’s what to do this New Years, rather than here’s what to do for New Years 2023). Refresh your content regularly to ensure it remains relevant, and create posts with topics that have either more generic value, or answers specific questions in an broadly applicable way.
Analytics
Analytics can help you find out more about how traffic is accessing your website. Are people clicking through to your site from Facebook or Twitter? By integrating Google Analytics on your website (not available on the free plan of WordPress.com), you can find out what the bounce rate (time before people leave) of each page of your site is, and specifically whether they come from Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. This information can help “turn insight into action” (Google Analytics, 2017). By evaluating website traffic and the behaviour of individuals who access your website, you can gain knowledge about what is and isn’t working on your website.
Evaluating social media analytics (e.g Facebook business analytics) and any other campaign analytics will also help you better define and refine your target audience, and get to know what your customers want from your business.