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I spent an interesting Sunday morning recently helping a couple of my clients with their new venture, KidsKit4Less. This is a new brand of baby & children’s indoor market covering Essex and Suffolk. Although I’ve been helping for some time now with their website, KidsKit4Less.co.uk, Sunday’s assistance was much more hands-on. A successful morning all-round!

Much of the marketing for KidsKit4Less has been through social media. Given the well-defined target market of sellers and shoppers, integration with social media was a key element of the website design. Facebook and Twitter traffic has been particularly busy leading up to the market – all helping to establish the brand and the image in potential customer’s minds.

A simple message today, but it’s an important one if you’re beginning to exploit online marketing through social media.

The message is this: Keep your website at the centre of your online marketing communications and your social media traffic.

Nothing maintains Google’s* interest in a website like traffic and links. So the more traffic and links to your site from the social networking giants, the better. So if you have a message, like I have this message here, make sure that the message itself lives on your website. Then make sure that your social media posts, on twitter, facebook and others, link to the message on the website.

By way of an example, I’ll tweet about this post when I’ve finished it. I’ll include a link to the post, which will generate a link to my website from a social networking giant. That’s a good start, but with the content of the tweet I’ll do my best to engage my followers and tempt them to click on the link within the tweet. This will generate traffic to my website, which is even better!

Here’s what the tweet looks like, complete with the link back to the post on my website:

Links = traffic = kudos

Remember…. Keep the message on the website

* I believe that other internet search providers are available!

The interweb would be a sorry place if no-one was prepared to share their knowledge. Just think of all those occasions that you’ve googled for a bit of help… People happily share what they know, what they’ve learned.

Whilst this is certainly the case with individuals, businesses have traditionally been less keen to share; after all, it’s their intellectual property that they would be giving away.

Luckily there is a new trend emerging among savvy businesses; the knowledge share. And how refreshing it is to stumble on these little helpful nuggets, just when you thought you were on your own.

Rest assured, help is out there. And it’s only right and proper that if you benefit from it then you should pass it on. Help yourself but help others too.

I’ll put my soapbox away now!

So we’re watching X Factor on timeslip, which is great because we can skip the adverts. Meanwhile, on Twitter, I’m seeing tweets about contestants who have already appeared on the show in real time… but are yet to appear on our delayed version.

This is a great illustration of the sheer immediacy of Twitter. I’ve heard the difference between Twitter and Facebook explained thus…

Facebook: “I’ve had a pee.”
Twitter: “I need to pee.”

I take this to mean that on Facebook people tend to tell you what happened and how they feel about it, whereas with Twitter they are more likely to tell you what is happening, now.

Luckily, from an online marketing perspective, this difference can be quite useful, because the difference itself does tend to polarise the audiences.

The Twitter audience will love to know what your business is up to right now, at this moment. That’s classic Twitter audience fodder. Establishing a new service today? Tweet it. Going in to a big client meeting? Tweet it.

On the other hand, the Facebook friends will usually be checking in later in the day, and this is your chance to tell them how you came up with your new service and what the success of that meeting will mean… and how you feel about it!

Or you can just blend everything onto all your social networks, like most people do. Less discerning maybe but a whole lot easier.