Social media is a great way to interact with your customers, build awareness and listen to what others are saying about you and your competition. So why do companies hide their social media involvement? It should be front and center on your website’s homepage.
This is one of the easiest ways to promote yourself! If you have a twitter account, Facebook fan page or Flickr account, make that link easy to find, not buried in some obscure location where I have to guess where to look.
A person who has reached your website, is already interested in you, so give them another opportunity to connect. In the past two weeks I have visited two websites that I knew had either a twitter account or presence on Facebook. Neither even mentioned those two social networking sites.
I liked what Steve Widmann and Aaron Hughling said during a recent interview with Shel Holtz on For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report, a podcast I listen to regularly. Steve and Aaron work at Scott & White Healthcare and discussed their hospital’s involvement with social media.
Shel mentioned he was impressed to see the links to the hospital’s social media sites were on the homepage of the website. He added that you don’t see that very often and many times you wouldn’t even know a company was engaged in social media.
Steve and Aaron responded that they didn’t want to hide their efforts, they wanted to put it front and center, and make it easy for people to find them.
Bingo.
Isn’t that why we are all networking on social media sites? Social media is the opportunity to listen, engage, and respond to your audiences. So why have a social media presence if you are going hide it?
One Kansas Girl 
Thanks for the positive mention Susan, glad you enjoyed the interview.
Aaron – sorry for the late response. I did enjoy the interview, and thanks for sharing your organization’s use of social media.
I think most companies do just the opposite; they use their social media sites to grow their company name and then link from their social media sites to their web site. When it really should be a circular effect of linking both ways. That way a customer or user has no problem getting to all aspects of the company.
I agree. And it does work both ways…a fanpage or twitter account should include the url to the organization’s website. People have a lot of options now to find brands…give them every opportunity to connect! Thanks for the comment, Mark.