6 Ways To Integrate Your On-Site & Social Efforts

Since search and social have had more of a convergence, the idea of the “hub” has become stronger, providing one main place to drive your existing audience and capture their attention. Most marketers or brands make the mistake of having social media be their “go to” place and they neglect any semblance of a strong blog or website strategy.

This results in is a lost “segment” of users – those who engage on social networks but never actually make it to your site and truly show interest in your brand.

Social leads to the sharing of content, but conversions and revenue are harder to quantify when following social channels. Driving users back to the end goal (your website) can often help you understand user behavior when they come from social, and what helps to convert them.

There should be a fine spiderweb existing between your on-site/blog strategy and your social strategy so that they’re synced up and integrated. Ideally, your blog/website should act as your homebase, and social should be a strategy that supplements your already existing on-site one.

Social media and blogging are also a long-term audience growing strategies which will allow brand and content to have longer legs, which is exactly why they need to work in tandem with each other.

The following are some tactical/strategic tips to make sure you’re leveraging both sides of the fence in your strategy.

1.  Authorship & Open Graph

Authorship and Open Graph are two things that can help immensely on the search and sharing side. Authorship is a fairly quick integration – if you’re the only author that’s contributing to your blog, a simple email verification via your domain email, and addition to contributions on the G+ profile side, will allow for authorship.

If you have multiple authors on your blog, integration takes slightly longer with a few more steps for integration. You’ll be able to check for authorship markup completion using the structured data testing tool.

Open Graph (OG) markup is something that’s fairly easy to integrate thanks to plugins that simplify the process. Sharing and social click throughs can be affected in a positive way by making sure that content or products are easily shareable with minimal modification by the end users.

The debugger is fairly straight forward and helps you identify loose ends or mistakes in your OG tags.

2.  Queue Up Old Posts For Promotion

Content has 9 lives – there’s been times that we’ve been working on content and given reports on how it has performed, what channels and communities it’s reached, and how many unique views it’s received, only to find out that months down the line there’s another huge spike in traffic.

This could be for many reasons – sometimes it’s seasonal, sometimes it’s because of the news, or sometimes it’s industry related. Other times, the right influencer picks up the content at a later date and it travels quickly through its new audience.

Instead of leaving the resurgence up to chance, take some time to identify old content that performed well in its hey-day, and slip it into your social calendar. By now, you have new members in your audience that will appreciate the content who may not have viewed it previously on site or through your social channels.

Ideal pieces for this:

• Evergreen content
• “How-to” style content

3.  Improve On Said Content

Likewise, when you’re planning on promoting an old piece of content again, also check to see if there’s any new information or examples that can be integrated into it.

One issue with promoting content that isn’t necessarily evergreen and has performed well in the past, is that the information could be outdated. You’ll want to make sure anything that you’re promoting again is sharing the latest information possible.

Also look for ways to change the content medium – can the updates be put in video or podcast form?

Content that can be improved upon:

• Seasonal content
• Holiday content
• Industry specific content around special events

4.  Reach Out When You Update Content

If you plan on updating older content to promote it again and help it reach a newer, broader audience, pull some backlinks and identify where the content was originally shared. Take the time to reach back out and notify them that you have updated your original post on the chance that they’re able to work it into their own editorial calendar.

5.  Identify Topical Twitter Chats

This is a strategy we have implemented in the past to help drive some users from social to on-site content. If you’re looking to expand your brand reach and generate relevant inbound links and social signals, publish an authoritative and unique piece of content prior to joining a Twitter chat that revolves around that particular subject. There are tons of Twitter chats out there and curated, constantly updated lists like this one.

Prior to participating in the chat, reach out and let others know the piece of content has been shared (especially with those who run blogs/websites of their own) since this can be a great way to drive awareness back to your blog and also encourage sharing of the content that contributed to the conversation.

6.  Identify Influencers & Add Value

There are plenty of influencers in the social space that also have curated content performing in their space. If you’re able to add value by aggregating your own proprietary data, reach out to that particular influencer and suggest a collaboration. You’ll be able to take advantage of their existing social base, add value to yours, and also help older content grow legs.

As social becomes a stronger and more integrated part of an overall organic SEO strategy, we’ll need to make sure that we’re not neglecting the traditional and basic means of promoting and sharing content on-site.

These are just some basic tactics that can be used to help weave the Web of social and on-site content in order to create an “audience hub” which all channels can leverage. Social media is an integral part of any large brand’s strategy, but there’s also something to be said for moving it back to basics and understanding what keeps a user on your actual site.