We had a lot of questions from yesterday's 5 Key Ingredients of Social Media for Your Website webinar that I didn't have time to answer so here we go.

Q: Are the social media components on “the knot” available via the Sitecore Developer Network?

A: You can use RSS which is available in Sitecore CMS to pull content into your website. Twitter has an RSS feed so you can display your Twitter stream on your website and LinkedIn has a public RSS feed so you can display LinkedIn updates and Answers on your website. Facebook turned off it's RSS Feed last year so you can't display your Facebook News on your website but you can install Simply RSS in your Facebook account and pull in your blog posts, LinkedIn updates and your Twitter stream. LinkedIn lets you pull in RSS feeds so you can display your blog and Twitter updates on your LinkedIn profile. This diversifies your traffic and automatically updates numerous social media properties.

Q: My biggest issue is, I have two kind of posts on our fb-fanpage. 1. I love the company, you're the best or 2. This product is broken, damaged etc. and questions concerning customer support. I have trouble getting customer service involved with FB and don´t know how to handle those messages as an it proffesional. Any tips?

A: Since customer support doesn't want to get involved with Facebook, you can create an Support tab on your Fan Page that contains ways to contact customer support. Search Facebook for play.com and you'll see their extensive Customer Support list under the Info tab.

Q: how much impact do custom tabs (canvas tabs) have (programmed with Facebook Markup language). are they alot more effective than “normal” facebook sites

A: I'm seeing more Facebook pages using the Facebook Markup Language which allows you to create Fan Pages that look like your website. This extends your brand to Facebook and lets you add newsletter opt in forms and custom content.

Q: For your customers to develop content on your website, what are some recommended platforms to develop that?  I have looked into Google Friend Connect as one way, but it doesn't do everything.

A: There are solutions for any open source or .NET content management system. For example, Joomla has Community Builder which lets you build your own online community. If you're running on .NET you can look at www.onesite.com. Another option is to use a hosted service like www.ning.com which is very customizable.

Q: Have you found a tool that aggregates the various social media metrics in a way for more easily created reporting?

A: Social media monitoring is an evolving market and there is a range of products for different price points. You can look at tools like www.trackur.com which is low cost but high in features and www.radian6.com on the higher end. Do a Google search for “social media monitoring” and you'll see many products. MarketingProfs.com has some case studies that review social media monitoring products.

Q: Help me understand how to apply SN to a Local Service company doing Bathroom Renovations

A: You could create a Facebook Fan Page and upload before and after photos of your work. You can also upload those photos to www.flickr.com and to your website. People love to look at pictures and they love to share their photos. You could even do a Twitter campaign where you encourage people to Tweet a picture of their bathroom and the person with the ugliest bathroom would win a discount. Then you could feature them in a Before/After campaign on your website and Facebook Fan Page.

I'll answer more questions in my next post.

Thanks for attending our webinar and here are links to the webinar recording, podcast and slides.

http://mediacontent.sitecore.net/5IngredientsSocialMedia/5IngredientsSocialMedia.html

http://mediacontent.sitecore.net/5IngredientsSocialMedia/5IngredientsSocialMedia.mp3

http://www.slideshare.net/sitecore/5-key-ingredients-of-social-media-for-your-website

Ted

About the author 

Ted Prodromou

Would you like me to help you?

I'm the #1 best-selling author of Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business and Ultimate Guide to Twitter for Business. People call me America's Leading LinkedIn Coach.

I'm the founder of Search Marketing Simplified, LLC, a full service online marketing agency. The SMS team designs and implements advanced LinkedIn and social media lead-generation strategies for small to medium-sized businesses. SMS will set up and manage your marketing funnels using organic, social and paid traffic.

Did you know I've been working with the internet since 1991, long before Al Gore invented it?

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