Web & Social Media Symbiosis: Creating a Mutually Beneficial Relationship Among All Your Online Communications Channels

Background:  For years the focus of online communications was your web site.  With the explosion of social media, just a web site is not enough – you must be able to connect with your users through channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.  However, to effectively communicate online, your web site and your social media channels must be intertwined in a symbiotic relationship.  Social media and web integration requires all your online channels to work together in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Program background:  The Injury Center has been a leader in social media at the CDC with a blog, Twitter account, three Facebook pages, targeted email channels, RSS feed, and more.  Therefore, a 2011 goal for the Injury Center HCSO web team is to implement a web and social media integration plan.  Evaluations had shown that a specific social media effort was more successful when intertwined with all communications channels.  Therefore, the web team designed a social media and web integration plan to ensure constant knitting together of all of our electronic channels. Our plan includes building social media pages for all of our topics; weaving social media content into the web content; linking to social media channels from every page; including web links in most social media posts; including social media links in email communications; embedding Facebook “Like”, “Recommend”, and “Comment” boxes; and building an Injury Center Lifestream widget that combines all of our social media output in one place.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Evaluating social media integration involves both quantitative and qualitative data, including web metrics data, Facebook Insights data, and evaluation of communications goals.  For example, the communication goal of the CDC Heads Up Facebook was to establish an online community of brain injury survivors and their friends and families.  The number of interactions on the Facebook page that then result in activity through to the Heads Up web site is more important than simply noting the number of followers in Facebook. As another example, a blog post about traumatic brain injury had initial success when it was promoted via our email channels and CDC’s Facebook and Twitter profiles.  However, it achieved new life with a spike in visits and comments when we posted about it on the Heads Up Facebook page.  In addition, web pages linked from that blog post also spiked.

Conclusions:  The results of our social media and web integration project demonstrate that uniting all our web and social media channels with consistent messaging to targeted audiences creates higher engagement on social media channels and increased web site traffic.

Implications for research and/or practice:  All channels must be considered in your communications plans, and considered as compliments to other channels in your plan.  Each channel can reach a unique audience and then drive some users to your other channels.  All channels should function as part of an overall strategy -- a symbiotic relationship to ensure consistently repeated messaging and maximized visibility.