A social media entry page is a page that doesn’t lie under your site’s domain. Rather, it remains under your control off-site. Social media websites such as MySpace allow you to design and edit content while engaging visitors and potentially gaining search engine visibility for your brand from the social media entry page. This entry page is not a supplement to your site, it should be viewed as its own site - your site, where people are introduced to your brand.

Each page about your brand appearing in the search engines or through inbound links is a potential entry page. Each entry page should be designed to guide the visitor to an action. Your homepage is one in a series of pages your visitors may see or enter through during their visit. As Seth Godin describes, “You don’t need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they’re all just as important.” Your social media entry page at MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo, Netvibes, or Pageflakes is just as important as your homepage, your PPC landing pages, and every entry page you have on your site.

During your search engine optimization efforts, did you discover that you need to take up more shelf space in the search engine results pages? There are dozens of opportunities for expanding your domain’s content into siloed structures and themes. You can do this to gain quality links to your content, and you improve your chances of appearing in the search engine results by being search engine friendly and by the increased number of quality links coming to your main site.

Going off-site with mini, themed content sites may be appropriate for some organizations, and may create quality links to your main site. However, they are potentially harmful to your search engine optimization efforts. Search engines can read IP addresses. If your mini sites aren’t truly off-site and isolated properly from your main site at a distinct IP address, the search engines may be able to penalize you for receiving links from a “bad neighborhood.”

Additionally, these mini-sites require their own SEO and link building efforts to provide any true benefit to the rankings of the main site. By taking your focus away from basic on-page optimization of your main site, you may not be doing all you can do for your main site. But blogs with RSS feeds, networking profiles, and start pages of aggregated content should all be part of the effort towards the ultimate goal of converting a visitor through a desired call to action. All of these content assets are standalone entry pages that send targeted traffic, through quality links, to your main site for conversion, or in some cases, convert visitors directly by phone, bypassing your main site entirely.

Social media is about engaging people so look for social media marketing opportunities that are easy to join and enjoy. These opportunities could be in blogs, networking sites, and start pages, as mentioned previously, or in social bookmarking, social news, podcasts, and video. By becoming part of the conversation and encouraging user generated content, you are marketing from the bottom up in a viral, word-of-mouth fashion. This engagement is often not built into business and nonprofit homepages, but the time and effort required for building a MySpace page, a Facebook group, a Squidoo lens, or customized start pages through Netvibes and Pageflakes is becoming smaller and smaller. Now is the time to move beyond just your homepage. Every page you create is an entry page, whether it is on your domain or off-site. As Justin Sanger, President of LocalLaunch.com said at SES Chicago last year (2006):

‘There is no single landing page for a business anymore. It’s not about a website. It’s about business information online. It’s a different way of thinking. We must cleanse, enrich and optimize content. Think: Atomization - separate and spread.’

Filed under: Social Marketing on Monday, June 4th, 2007 by Jacob Wolfsheimer |
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