Social Media Marketing eBook

12 Ways to Make Your Website Ready for Social Media Creators

Before you launch a social media marketing campaign–contacting bloggers for product reviews, posting videos on YouTube, advertising on Facebook, whatever–make sure your house is in order. This article describes ways to make your website a friendly, usable place for social media creators like bloggers, podcasters and video-bloggers.

Get Linkable

Ensure that social media creators can link to any and every page on your website. This goes double for websites with online product catalogs. Make it easy for bloggers to write, “I really love this!” and send visitors to your website. Too many sites rely on Flash or arcane organization to display their products. As a result, the URL in the address bar doesn’t reference the particular product you’re viewing.

Both these companies make great products, so we’re reluctant to pick on them, but Matt & Nat and Crumpler both have disappointing websites in this regard. Bloggers are left writing, “click ‘Products’, then scroll to the fourth bag from the right, then pick the blue one…”

It’s simple, a usable website generates more incoming links.

Make a Social Media Resources Page

A social media resources page is a one-stop-shop on your site for traditional press kit info, plus links and new media goodies that bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers can use. In case you’re wondering, a social media resource page works for traditional media, too.

Why bother updating your online press center? If social media creators have good resource material on hand, they may be more inclined to take on your story. Remember, most bloggers have day jobs, so they don’t always have the time and resources to do extensive research and interviews. If you provide easy access to solid, well-written background materials, you also improve the odds of getting an accurate story.

You can include all the basics from a traditional press kit on your social media resourcesq page. Just add the following and you’re good to go:

1. The all important contact email of a real person—please not ‘info@’. A phone number is also good. Skype or other instant messenger contacts, even better.
2. Product box photos, if you have them. You know, the ones that make it look like your product comes in a box, even if it doesn’t.
3. Screenshots—upload these to Flickr so that they are easily embeddable. Bloggers like to include images with their stories, so provide a few different options.
4. Links to downloadables, if appropriate, so they can check out your product.
5. Links or aggregated headlines from company blogs, Twitter or other news feeds.
6. A link to product marketing info.
7. A link to technical documentation.
8. Links to other third-party reviews and posts.
9. Demo videos, if you have them. Plus, the code required to embed the video into an html page.
10. A blogroll demonstrating you’re active in the blogosphere.
11. Create a link roll with Ma.gnolia or del.icio.us. Bookmark interesting blog posts, articles, photos and video about your product, company, or industry.

Here’s a link to a social media resource page we helped Litebook Inc. create. The Han Solo with Litebook images—meant to demonstrate the actuall size of the product particularly popular with bloggers. Go figure.

This is adapted from our ebook. You can find more sample chapters here.

Tags: bloggers, crumpler, marketing, mattandnat, pr, social media, web design