A couple of weeks ago we had a chance to look at the significance of Facebook as a replacement for the business website.

The article suggested that maybe businesses might be planning on using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites as their corporate hub instead of their business website. We had suggested that using social media as your hub was a bad idea. Your business website should be the hub of your business online marketing while everything else that you do online should be an extension of that hub.

VanSEODesign wrote an article last Thursday entitled: “Why Your Website is More Valuable Than Facebook” that talked about whether your business website is more important than Facebook or vise versa.

Many local only businesses still forego developing a site for their business, restaurants especially. Some, having heard of social media, are now setting up profiles and marketing through social sites, but still don’t have their own website. Is this a good idea? Is a website no longer necessary? Or are these businesses making a huge mistake?

Check out the article and let us know what you think? Are you creating a Facebook page before you build your website?

Do you really need a website when there’s social media sites?

The Hub

Your website needs to be more than a brochure

For many years businesses they have treated their website along the same lines as their business cards. We need to have it, but “do we really need anything more than a phone number on it”? Wait, hang on…the designer in me needs to restart my heart after that comment. The answer is Yes! Its true, many business just think of their websites as an after thought. Most businesses agree that their overall image management starts with the statement that the first impression is everything when it comes to business. But, many don’t take that approach when it comes to their website. Many business websites are nothing more than electronic business cards that are static and meant only to give contact information to the end user. With good design, this could be a good first impression, but is it an impression that will last with the end user?

The standard formula for a business website is to give you the history about their company, a chance to meet the staff with a quick bio, and a list of services. Really? That’s it? Makes me think of a brochure or pamphlet. Is that the direction of business websites today? Will this trend allow the business website to compete on the web today? To answer that question I think we need to take a look at social media and how it is shaping the web.

How is Facebook Changing Business?

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are very popular. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in population behind China and India. That’s enough for us to take a look at what is working for them and to ask the question, “what is the draw”?

I believe Facebook and other social media sites have some common elements that are making them popular with end users. They are quick and interactive. Their content is fresh and relevant. It is user driven. It is evolving. Facebook and others social media sites can react quickly to market trends. They make it easier to share information and build trust through their interactions. These are the exact things that are missing from many business websites today.

So is the Corporate Website Obsolete?

is your business website obsolete

The flip side to the question is that your company website is not obsolete if you make the decision to make changes. The simple fact is that your website can use a makeover. Here at MosaicTeam are actually tweaking our website right now after going through a major change last year. Actually all website should be under review from time to time to make sure they still match your company’s mission statement and are relevant to your clients. Websites cannot continue to be nothing more than electronic business cards. Companies need to look towards Facebook and apply some of the same techniques. The key to a successful website is to make it the hub of information for your company. The other elements around this hub will included your print marketing, your social media marketing, and your business networking opportunities. All of these work in conjunction to highlight the centerpiece, your website. So, the centerpiece needs to be special. It cannot just be a fancy business card. To be successful, your company website needs to have a few qualities that can be taken from the social marketing world:

• Informative
• Interactive and Engaging
• Fun
• Able to be updated quickly
• Use media such as audio and video

Is your website accomplishing these things? Are you using the social media tools available to interact with your clients? Are you using media such as video? Does your site look like it was design when the internet was invented? I believe that sites that refuse to change with the web and continue to dismiss the power of social media, those businesses will suffer when it comes to their website. And since it is the hub of information regarding a company, the company could suffer as well. Social media sites such as Facebook have shown that providing information and engaging with clients works. It is now time for businesses to seriously look at their website and see if they are measuring up. Over the next week we are going to look at some tools that businesses can use to create a website that is informative, engaging, fun and has the ability to be updated quickly. Let us know what you think and stay tuned over the next several days.

Images provided by Internet Marketing and Nick Fisher.

Getting your Twitter account set up and understanding that Twitter can be used to help you market, brand, and interact with you clients is just the first step. Now, you need to actually use it. Don’t worry, the task is not as daunting as it sounds. There are some great twitter tools out there to help your business monitor and engaged in social media. Using Twitter for business has never been easier. Let’s take alook a few of the top tools for social media dashboards to help business ride the social wave.

Twitter Tools for Business

TweetDeck

TweetDeck: Awesome Social Media Dashboard

TweetDeck, well to put it simply, is awesome. Especially since they updated and added the ability to schedule updates. This desktop social media dashboard is more than just a twitter tool. First off, it is built on Adobe Air and can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Secondly, it is packed with features. It can manage multiple accounts, schedule updates, manage Twitter lists, share and view photos, and many others. TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more. It is what I use for my personal tracking of my social media accounts.

HootSuite

HootSuite is Top Shelf Social Media Management

Hoot Hoot. This is, in my opinion, the top shelf social media manager. It is what we use at MosaicTeam to manage not only our social media accounts, but the accounts of our clients. HootSuite has many features and is truly aimed towards businesses who handle multiple accounts. A few of the features that we liked were:

• Multiple Networks
• Team Workflow
• Statistics. This is a huge plus!
• Multi-Stream View

• Tabbed Layout
• WordPress Intergration
• Schedule Updates

CoTweet

Manage your Corporate Twitter Accounts Easily

CoTweet is a fairly new Twitter tool for business. We mention it here, because if you are only going to use Twitter (really?) and you have multiple people in your company using the same Twitter account then this may be your tool. It does have some great features such as: multiple accounts, schedule updates, multi-account posting, assignments, and sharing of On-Duty responsibilities. This is definitely one platform to watch.

Other Twitter Tools

Along with having a great dashboard tool to manage your Twitter accounts, there are a couple of other tools that we would like to mention.

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed will allow you to take several feeds from your blog, Facebook, other Twitter feeds and mash them together and have them posted elsewhere. There is also some great tracking tools that go with this. TwitterFeed integrates very well with HootSuite, as one of its features is to bring in RSS feeds.

TwitterStats

We just started using this in addition to the HootSuite analytics. TwitterStats will create a graph representation of your tweets/hr, tweets/mo, your tweet timeline, and your reply statistics.