In order for a company to successfully utilize social networks like Twitter, you must directly associate it with your business. The easiest way to get started is to start blogging about your industry and distributing that content across the web. It’s a great way to let other people know who you are and what you do.

However, for the visitors that come to your site outside of a social network link it’s important that they also know about your social network contributions.

I recently came across a great way to keep your website visitors directly connected to your social media efforts. It’s called Tweetboard.

Basically, Tweetboard is a Twitter conversation for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream onto your website and allows for conversations between you and your visitors. They’ve even started using a new term to define it, “micro-forum”.

It’s less than a forum, but more than commenting because it lives in a real-time discussion environment. Each time someone posts via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.

We’ve added the Twitter app to our own site so please feel free to leave us a comment via our tweetboard and let us know what you think about our blog.

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We listed things every website must have, tips for landing pages, and ways to engage your readers, so now we want mash all of that up into a new idea, integrating your social campaign with your main website.

#1 – Add live streaming content to your website.
Your visitors want to know that what they are looking at is the newest most current information. Give your site a fresh look by adding an RSS feed from a continually updating data source.

For example: Add your Twitter feed to your homepage. Check out the Twitter widgets for an easy way to display your Twitter updates on your website.

BONUS TIP: Try adding an RSS feed from a popular news source that publishes content about your industry. Like Digg or CNN.

#2 – Add social features to your website.
Offer your visitors a way to connect and interact other than just a phone number or a contact form. While you may not want to offer comments on your site a good alternative would be to add a Get Satisfaction profile to your website. It’s a great way to help connect your customers to your business.

#3 – Add social buttons to your website.
A critical component to facilitating an online conversation about your services or products is to offer your visitors a way to easily share your content with others. An easy “email this” button or bookmark button might be the difference between a visitor sending your website to a friend or adding it to their own social bookmarking site. Try addthis.com, it is a clean easy to install button that features all of the major social bookmarking sites.

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Social media is difficult to understand if you don’t know what the words mean. Let’s take a look at a few more social media buzz words and define them.

Social bookmarking: A website for sharing interesting links with your friends and anyone else that might be interested. It functions like your internet browser’s bookmarking function, except you can access them through any computer.

Wiki: Harnessing the power of community knowledge, a wiki is an online open source hub for information on many different topics. The most well known wiki is Wikipedia, but there are many many wiki sites available on a varitey of topics. (Wikitravel, Recipes Wiki, even a Star Trek Wiki)

Meme: An idea or item of pop culture that becomes popular and people begin to build upon that idea. It often starts with a simple idea that spreads. It is pronounced “meem” (rhymes with theme or dream). A popular internet meme are lolcats.

Mashup: Two separate ideas or content that are mashed together to form something new. Mashups can be a video, a song, or between websites. Memes are commonly mashed-up, which leads to the viral effect.

Social Media Optimization: Making content easily accessible through RSS feeds, social networks, and social bookmarking sites. If a video is optimized for social media it is able to be embedded on other sites. If your website is optimized for social media it has an RSS feed.

Web 2.0: Don’t worry, it’s not a new internet. You won’t have to upgrade your internet connection. It’s a new way of thinking about how users interact with the internet. Rather than websites being static sources of information, the internet is changing to provide streams of constant information that is provided by multiple data sources. Less mainstream news centers and more bloggers and freelance journalists.

Viral Marketing: As the name implies, it is an item of interest that becomes so popular it is passed on from person to person much like a virus. You can not create a viral video or a viral marketing idea. Something becomes viral by the fact that people pass it on because they want other people to see it.

Read “Social Media Terms, Defining the Buzz Words Part One”

Have a word you want us to define? Leave a comment and we’ll add it to the list.

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