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Monday, June 20, 2011

Why You Need A Clear Strategy for Social Media in Your Web Design

Social media is clearly becoming a very popular strategy for marketing success and a modern web design is considered incomplete if it does not include some attempt to connect with social media. Although social media can be a fantastic tool for connecting your web design with potential customers and increasing the reach of your website, it will not succeed unless it is applied with a clear strategy.

The first step in web design is determining the purpose of your website, by asking yourself exactly what you want to achieve by building an online presence. Secondly you need to question whether social media can support this purpose in concurrence with your web design. Typically social media will advance the goals of any web design, but it may need to be used in an idiosyncratic way, which will garner more success in the long run.

Your social media purpose may be to portray your business as caring and interactive with your customers and to promote competitions or deals, or to create a viral and engaging presence online. It must be recognised that use of social media in website design is vastly different from traditional advertising and cannot be approached in the same manner. The goal is typically to engage with your audience in a interactive and collaborative way, not to broadcast never-ending advertisements that will likely be ignored by the user.

Using social media in the wrong way could actually do your web design more harm than good, as your audience is put off by desperate attempts to gain their attention. It is not enough to simply establish accounts in each popular site, and wait for the customers to come to you, either. A good social media strategy involves finding what is unique about your business and sharing that quality with a wider audience. Additionally, constant re-evaluation of your strategy is needed, as the social media network is always being updated, you don't want to be left behind for sticking to a strategy that is no longer relevant.

Including a clear social media strategy in your web design will undoubtedly forward the ultimate purpose of your website, by giving your web design an individual presence and taking advantage of all that your business has to offer. This may be a local sensibility, a customer service focus or pretty much anything else.