3 Ways to Infuse Your Homepage with Social Media Goodness

Social media is all the rage these days. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, the list goes on. People want to know who you are, what you look like, what you’re doing and where you’re going. It’s an information craze that would drive IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer insane.

Organizations are adapting to the ever-changing landscape of social media, though with a cautious and unassertive approach. Unfortunately, playing it safe when it comes to social media will only have you chasing prospects and customers instead of the other way around.

Below are some lightening quick ways you can shift toward a more social media focused homepage for your web site. These aren’t revolutionary changes, but they should help you to stay ahead of the pack at least until you can develop a more coherent social media strategy. The three critical areas to focus on are interaction, information and portability.

Designate an area for social media feeds

Interaction: Let people follow your updates and engage with your organization.

Assuming you already have a Twitter account and Facebook fan page, you should pop in the latest updates directly on your homepage. This doesn’t have to be a prominent feature and you may even find success in the footer, but you should definitely highlight the freshest of fresh news and updates from your organization. Both Twitter and Facebook offer easy tools to integrate your web site with their services.

Create a spot for blog posts, press releases and events

Information: Give people something to chew on including fact-rich press releases and brain-pleasing blog posts.

Don’t have a blog? Set one up. Blogs are essential in allowing your organization to communicate openly with target audiences. You probably already have press releases (if not, where has your company been the past century?) and perhaps even events. Stream these directly to your homepage. People want to see some of the more formal things your organization is up to. I would recommend featuring these items more prominently.

Provide RSS feeds both as an icon and back-end link

Portability: Make it easy for people to consume your information in a way they desire.

People thrive on information, and they want it now and in a form they can most easily digest. RSS is the kingpin when it comes to this. I highly recommend to all my clients to hook up their feed with Google’s FeedBurner for tracking purposes. Once that’s done, make sure RSS is easy to find on the homepage. The standard orange icon will suffice along with a <link> tag on the back-end for browser support. And here’s a bonus nugget to think about: Some people are giving up RSS for Twitter. In that case, I recommend using Twitterfeed to automatically feed your blog posts to your Twitter account. If you blog a lot (as in more than a couple times a week), just handpick some posts to tweet about. Otherwise, you risk overloading your followers with too much information.

One Response to “3 Ways to Infuse Your Homepage with Social Media Goodness” (Leave a Comment)

1. Dale Little says:

   March 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm

   Great tips, Chris! Web site possibilities seem limitless. It’s great to have a list of easy to do “must-have’s”

   Reply