Newsletters and Social Media Mix

Constant Contact Email marketing + social media
Email marketing + social media

There has been some discussion online about whether you can or should replace your email newsletter with Facebook messaging.  I think the answer is NO — there is place for both in your marketing mix.  In your target audiences some people are more comfortable with email and others are more tuned in to Facebook and other social media.

Constant Contact, an online service for managing your email newsletters and announcements, has added a very useful feature that marries the two worlds so you can reach both arenas with no more work than a click on a check box when you send your email.   Add the social media links to your email and this enables your recipients to easily share it with their Facebook friends, tweet it, add it to LinkedIN or other social networks.  On your control panel you as administrator can also share and tweet the email.

Your internet presence is increasingly a web of interactions.  Ideally you should be driving traffic to your “Call to Action” and tracking conversion of traffic to the relationships you are developing and sales.

Links:

Denise Davies is an Internet and media consultant.  She works with nonprofit organizations and small businesses to maximize their effective use of the Internet to build their organization and achieve their objectives.  If you have questions or would like to learn more contact through the contact form

 

Website + Social Media for Building Traffic

Your own WEB consists of multiple internet based tools and publishing areas. Each contributes to building traffic, interactivity, collaboration and network building. See diagram and explanation

I often get asked about the advantages of having both a website AND using online social networking – Facebook, LinkedIN, and other social media.

Also – is an email newsletter effective in building traffic.

The way that i visualize it is with this diagram:

The WEB of website + Social Media

Your own WEB consists of multiple internet based tools and publishing areas.  Each contributes to building traffic, interactivity, collaboration and network building.

Having a Facebook Page (your business page), articles, blog, listings and postings on professional portals, a YouTube channel for video, FLICKR area for photos, postings from press releases and news sites all potentially bring traffic to your website and also give people the opportunity to “like”, post comments and questions and interact with you.  All these activities help you in building your network and list of interested contacts.

An email newsletter similarly is a simple “call to action” that people can sign up for on your website or from other entry points. People who sign up are interested in continuing to receive information from you.  Constant Contact provides social networking links from the emails that you send out – and also you can publish an archive on your website.

Develop a plan and strategy on how to use Social Media. Include a timeline and also a plan on how to reuse / republish information in different formats so that you get multiple uses without a lot of extra work.

Your Social Networking sites can all be integrated with your website.  You or your web developer gets the code and adds the code to one or more places on the website.

Examples:

  • http://www.eckova.ca – the home page integrates the Eckova Facebook page and blog.  Various other locations on the website include integrations e.g. in the sidebar area and inside pages.
  • http://antigonishfilmfest.org – the home page integrates the Facebook Page

Denise Davies is an Internet and media consultant with Eckova.  She works with nonprofit organizations and small businesses to maximize their effective use of the Internet to build their organization and achieve their objectives.  If you have questions or would like to learn more contact by email at davies@eckova.ca

 

 

Is Your Website Facebook Friendly?

Make it easy for people to use Facebook to share your web pages.

The number of people using Facebook continues to rise and businesses and nonprofits are learning to use it to reach their current friends and build a broader social network.

An active Facebook user will often share links to an interesting web page with their social network.  You can make it easy for them to do this by having your webmaster add a “Share this page on facebook

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php”>Share</a><script src=”http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share”></script>

See http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php for explanation.  Add the code to each page of your website to make it easy for people to share with their friends.

Integrating your website with Facebook using this “share” widget is one way to bring additional visibility and traffic to your website.

Contact me or sign up for our newsletter for additional help on maximizing your effective use of the Intetnet.