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Social media is all around us at the moment with literally millions of users using sites such as Facebook and Twitter everyday it is becoming more and more essential that your website can integrate with your Twitter and Facebook accounts.  This article will explain how this can be done, to help drive traffic to your website.

Facebook has around 300 million users.  Twitter use is growing at over 1000%.  It seems pretty clear that in order to drive traffic to your site it is important that your site utilises social media.  I mention Facebook and Twitter because it is clear that these tend to be the main players.  Ask almost anyone (under the age of around 50) do you have a Facebook account and the answer tends to be yes.

When integrating the two into your website we need to look at your website as the hub for all your goings on, on the web.  This is where you want people to be.  When they are looking at your website it means that they are viewing your products and services that you are offering and therefore there is a chance of a sale and the possibility of making more money.  So what you need to do is use these social media sites in order to help drive traffic to your website, the hub and purpose of your online presence.

Another key point to mention here is the word consistency.  By that I mean consistency in brand look and naming across the social media sites as well of course on your own site.  It is more and more important that you try and get your companies name on social networking sites, rather than something else.  Your companies name is what people will look for and what you want people to associate you with.  The good things is that there are several tools that can help you secure your ‘username’ on a wealth of social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook.  Here are two that I have found and used:

Know Em Username Check – a site that discovers whether your username, brand or company name is available of social websites across the internet.  There is a even a paid service that lets them sign up for all the sites leaving you time to get on with your every day tasks.

Namechk – allows you to check your username availability across many different social networking sites.  It is a little simpler than Know Em but equally as effective, however there is no paid service for signing up for you.  The site tells where your name is available and you have to do the leg work.

I would recommend that you reserve your name for all the major sites, even the ones that you do not intend to use.  Importantly it will stop anyone else using the name and posting content using your companies identify.

So once you have your usernames signed up for it is a matter of getting them into one place, so that it is easy to update all your websites.  The way that I do this is to use a Facebook application called ‘Selective Twitter‘.  This means that any Twitter updates that you post that you end with ‘#fb’ will be posted as your status on Facebook.  Therefore you never really need to visit Facebook again in order to update your Facebook profile.

When it comes to updating your Twitter status, I tend to opt for TweetDeck.  This allows you to use a desktop application in order to update your statuses and it can also handle multiple accounts if you have a personal Twitter account as well.  However there are several tools which you can use in order to update your status for your WordPress Dashboard.  A search for ‘Twitter’ or ‘Social Media’ in the WordPress plugins repository will provide several plugins that will do the job, depending on the complexity of your needs.

Once you have everything working I would then recommend branding your Twitter page.  Once you have logged into Twitter from their homepage you can click on settings and design and then choose some suitable colours and perhaps even a background image that will match your website.  This will enable visitors to easily identify the brand, product or company to which the Twitter page is referring to.  A simple but important step in my point of view.

So there you have it, a quick guide to integrating social media to your website and outlining some of the benefits that it can bring to your business and your own website.