Social Media & Your Website
Finding friends, liking posts, adding favorites, joining groups, shopping and the list goes on for reasons why people spend so much time on social media today. Being connected to people is just human nature but technology takes the experience to a level that most people on social media barely understand. Some would say that a huge part of companies like Google’s success has come from the mastery of human behavior on the internet against actual psychology dissertations. Combining these results has certainly changed when and how we interact on social media but for entrepreneurs, it has literally turned backdoor businesses into million-dollar corporations.
The average person is probably on social media trolling through their feed watching new video post, reading memes, seeing who tagged who, or any other personal interest matter but what else is happening in the background these social media sites are tracking and logging your behavior along with your general account information including things like demographics, age, and gender. To take it a step further platforms like Facebook encourages you to take surveys of personal interest so they can find out what type of books you read, or movies you watch, or what food you eat the most, and a lot more. Having this very detailed information about millions of people can be useful in a number of ways but structured analytics of this sort definitely holds the most value to businesses small or large.
Consulting clients for over 10 years now I still hear business owners say, I’ll just use social media to market, and without discrediting the power of social media your conversion rate would be significantly different by leading them to a website for a point of sale. These websites are called landing pages or squeeze pages, sometimes one-pagers depending on the general use. They’re usually a web page with information only about the product with no top menu so the viewer won’t easily navigate away from the page. Some squeeze pages may only be a button to upgrade your package. The uses for these pages are limitless and virtually every industry uses them in product campaigns or promotions so it’s least to say it’s imperative to your social media success.
Let’s discuss why entrepreneurs and small businesses should utilize their social media and website together from a not-so-technical perspective. Social media was not only built for us to socialize with each other but for us to communicate in categorized groups that we join or create of our own. Look at it like this, you’re at a huge fashion conference with tons of vendors selling similar products as you are. You see a group of people spectating, you get closer and see a beautiful table set up with banners and advertisements and products spread across the table. In a real-world instance being on social media and not having a web page is a lot like being at a conference with no vendor table. At a physical conference with no venders table, you are forced to walk around with business cards and only tell people how good your product is. Giving potential customers the option to have a place to go to review the product in detail away from all the social media distractions is essential. Another benefit of having a web page is being able to offer add ons or extensions to your existing products, that’s usually where squeeze pages come in. The bottom line is it’s not only professional but necessary to have your own domain name (.com) and in order to compete on social media, you will need to get some of that traffic to land on your page and not Facebook’s or Instagram’s.
