A meager 19.5 percent of small and medium sized businesses link to their Facebook page from their website and even less to their Twitter or LinkedIn profiles, shows data released by data collection and analyses engine SMB DigitalScape.
vSplash’s engine analyzed over 1 million SMB from 14 countries, of which more than 700,000 were from the USA and identified a common trend: businesses fail to properly use their website to promote social media presence. The situation is worse than just failing to use social media to their advantage: 74.7 SMB websites have no email link on their homepage where customers can contact them. A little over 65% also lack any kind of form that consumers might fill to request information.
The overwhelming majority of analyzed SMB websites are not mobile compatible, trusting their consumers would never use a mobile device to visit them.
Why would small and midsized businesses launch social profiles and then not promote them properly? Simply because most of them lack the time, the experts and the resources to properly mix their social effort into their general online strategy and miss out on quite accessible ways of engaging existing and potential customers on social networks.
While the website is the official online home, the purpose of social media profiles is to actually start conversations with consumers. Just as you wouldn’t think of not adding your business website to your Facebook page, you should never fail to add your Facebook page to your website, along with all other social media profiles. Online marketing channels are interlinked and should be treated as such.
SMBs jump at creating social profiles, mostly for the promise of free promotion and inspired by viral social messages and booming success stories, but don’t always think their strategy through or really integrate any social effort with their existing marketing or PR campaigns. That is why the most obvious places to promote social profiles, such as their own website, escape them.