Last time I posted specifically about adding Facebook plug-ins to your author webpage, to help encourage your readers and visitors to easily spread the word about your book to their social community of friends. Naturally, this is a good tactic to pursue for businesses and companies as well. In fact, there are a variety of ways to easily add social media plug-ins to your site. Facebook makes it easy to add plug-ins for Facebook, but other sites make it just as easy to add other social networks, as well, including Twitter, Digg, and more.
Perhaps the most popular and user-friendly avenue to take is with http://sharethis.com, which not only provides easy code to cut and paste into your site, but it starts to track the analytics that result, which can help you identify your “social reach.” We very recently added this functionality to some of our static webpages on Outskirts Press (these buttons, or at least the analytics that result, don’t work very well on dynamic pages of our site, apparently).
Of course, as I mentioned last time, the downside is that when you initially add this code, your “social reach” is zero, as are the number of times anybody has clicked on your new social media buttons. So you want to immediately start soliciting clicks to your buttons after adding them, since the appeal of participating in social media is the “social” part; and big fat O’s don’t look very social.
President of Outskirts Press 