The Role of Social Media on Your Website: If You’re Not Using It- Lose It

The Role of Social Media on Your Website: If You're Not Using It- Lose It

Social media is about connecting. One of my pet peeves is for business websites to have social media icons to various platforms, but they have not updated them for months or sometimes years.

My rule is, if you are not using it – lose it!

We all have our favorite social media accounts to use and some of us will use more than others, but if you are going to have the icon on your website, you should try to do one update a week and at the minimum of once a month. If you cannot keep on top of that consider farming out your social media updates to an employee or contactor.

When you are operating in a competitive market, social media interaction may be the one thing that helps differentiate you from your competitors. Especially if you are providing value to users in the things you are doing on social media.

It does not have to be difficult to keep your platforms updated. You can use an application like Hootsuite or Sendible to schedule, repeat, and save updates to reuse. In fact with Hootsuite, you can even send the same update to multiple profiles with one click.

Don’t make things hard for yourself, boost traffic and engage clients with the smart use of social media.

 

How to Get Rid of Ad Overlays When Posting Videos on Your Site

Here are a few web video tips you may find helpful as you consider if you are ready to expand your video postings on your website.

Google loves it when a site uses YouTube for videos, but customers hate putting web videos on YouTube due to the ad overlays.

I recently ran into an issue where we were putting a video on the home page of a website in a key position that is the very first thing any visitor will see. Once loaded to YouTube and embedded in the website my first reaction was URGH look at those ads mid-stream and at the end of the video that stay up obscuring my clients work.

There are two things that you can do to prevent ads on your videos. 1.) Turn off monetization in your YouTube account so ads do not appear on your videos. 2.) Use a free service like the Basic Vimeo account.

You can watch these videos for nice instructions on how to turn off ads in YouTube. It is a 2 step process. First turn off ads and then go into the info/settings of each video travel to the monetize section and turn off for each video.  This video shows you how to turn off the pre-video ad in your channel settingsThis is a nice video that explains the second process.  What is important to know is that you are in control of the monetization of your own videos. But by default, it looks like if you don’t manually turn monetization off, Google will slap ads all over the start, middle and end of your video.

Alternatively you can use Vimeo. I like the interface and like that you can customize the player. The downside is that Google loves it’s owner properties. I see YouTube videos in the search results all the time, but would be hard pressed to say that I regularly see Vimeo videos in the search results.

The choice is yours which service you’ll use, but for now, I am actually using both.