Social media marketing is an important way to build and maintain connections for your business. Social media offers an opportunity to increase the exposure of your business and also helps build communities around it. To employ social media to its full potential, it is essential that you incorporate it organically into your brand website to make it more engaging. In this article you will find some ‘best practices’ to help you in the process.

Once you have created a website for your business, you might want to increase brand identification. To do this, you should create pages on popular social media websites such as Facebook or Twitter that correlate with your website in message and design. Once you have created these pages, incorporate the social media website logos into your brand website. This will help your business gain exposure through multiple points of visibility and will also cause instant identification between your brand and the popular social media. This can be a great thing for your business, as the social media users may associate your brand and the social media websites as both being “cool.”

Another connection that you should make with your business website and social media is to build social media sharing links into your website posts. By including ‘share’ buttons on your website, you are creating an easier way for readers to suggest your website to others. This increases the likelihood that readers WILL share your website, which in turn increases the amount of potential viewers of your brand. The exposure that your business will gain from the built-in sharing links is bound to go up, but to ensure that readers will want to share your posts, make them interesting and visually appealing.

A visually appealing and very effective use of social media marketing is to employ Facebook as the commenting system on your business website. This is a simple and easy addition that could significantly increase traffic to your website. It works by allowing users to sign in with their Facebook account, which is not only efficient for the user but useful to you. When they post a comment to your website, the comment will also be posted to their Facebook wall, along with a link to your website. This increases exposure and allows people to associate their friends with your website, making them more likely to pay it a visit. This builds a sense of community around your website that could be a valuable asset to your business.

Finally, the use of popular social media websites Twitter and Facebook could help increase exposure of your website with their ‘plugins’. These are user-friendly tools that organically connect the user with your website by creating an interactive experience. It allows users to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ your website, which again will be posted on their personal page for their ‘followers’ to see. The links between your website and people have the potential to grow exponentially.

When you incorporate social media into your business website, it has the potential to acquire instant exposure that can lead to a sense of community that without social media it may never have gained. This community can create brand recognition and identification for your website that can lead to more exposure, which means more customers for your business.