As of April 2012, Facebook has over 900-million users. Needless to say, Facebook is doing just fine. It's time to build your readership.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of the world’s most mammoth corporations can be found “setting up shop” on someone else’s social media property rather than fortifying their own home-base...their website.

The fact is, this line of thinking flies in the face of what inbound marketing experts have consistently campaigned; that the greatest online “asset” your company has is its own website. An asset that is built from your hard-earned visitors, who are (of course) frequently visiting your site in order to consume the amazing, targeted content found there. This is your “captive” audience, your true fans, the life-blood of any growing business.

So, why would these otherwise smart people ever think it a good idea to incorporate a social media marketing strategy that drives that lusted-after traffic away from their websites and to those sites owned by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google+?

Let's explore this a bit further.

Twitter is the great equalizer in content distribution…true.

What better use of this wonderful tool than to build upon your own online “asset” (your website), which has been created from like-minded content consumers? People, who love what you have to say, who visit your website to learn more, and subscribe to your mailing list for updates on your topic.

Facebook has become the online hangout for hundreds of millions of users world wide…true.

This does not mean that your days should be spent “hanging out” alongside your potential clients and customers (Facebook users spend an average of 7.5 hours there a month!). It also does not mean that it should be hastily disregarded simply as a “time waster” for your business. At least, not before properly investigating efficient ways that you might “mine” leads from Facebook’s vast resources.

Linkedin, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Google+, Digg, Reddit, the list goes on and on.

All of these amazing social tools have enormous potential, built from their troves of users (aka real human beings). Each of these users is waiting for someone like you to swoop in and give a damn about their needs or to solve their problems.

From a design prospective, this means a couple of things for your social media marketing strategy.

1. Consistency is key.

You want to be sure that you have adequately "built-out" your social media channels in such a way that readers/participants will easily recognize that they are visiting just one out-postof a cohesive online brand.

2. What’s the Point?

Limit your participation with each social media outlet to one or two (max) primary tasks wherever you can. That might mean content distribution and/or customer service via Twitter, weekly promotions via Facebook, helpdesk-style forum participation on Linkedin. There can be some overlap here as users of one service may not frequent the others, but the idea is that you can begin to develop themes both through design and content for each of these tools to better aid visitors in understanding what benefit there is to using them.

3. “Click your heels three times…”

All of your social media outlets should not only “point” back to your homepage, but actively drive traffic there. This can be done in a variety of ways. Some of my favorites are the different techniques for providing “teaser” content on social media sites that link back to the full article/idea within your own website. The design of this “teaser” content can resemble that of the corresponding section of the site you will be sending visitors to…continuing upon this theme of design continuity.


We certainly have oodles more to discuss on the topic of social media…

But, for the moment, the main take-away should be that social media sites are a wonderful and vast resource for distributing your best content to people who are already spending time there, in order to draw some of those folks back to your site…not the other way around.