Not that I recommend closing down your corporate website – although I’m sure some do – it is time to pull your corporate website apart. Thanks to the Social Web, your content can reach a much wider audience outside the boundaries of your site.

Spreading your content

It becomes increasingly important to publish your content where your audience can find – and share – your material.

Simply put: upload your videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, documents on Scribd and presentations on Slideshare. Regular text? Keep it on your site, but make sure it’s available through RSS and notify (or ‘ping’) news aggregators that new content is available.

The bad news: unless your content management system supports it, you’ll have to manage all those services manually. And always – always – keep copies of your original material.

Decide how social you want to be

Make a conscious decision on how you configure your accounts:

• do you allow for comments? (make sure you can follow up)
• do you allow others to embed your content? (excellent way to spread your brand)

Bringing it back together

Now that you have your content spread out, you still should make sure you bring it back into your own site. All of the services mentioned above provide embedding features making integrating the different types of material a breeze.

To finish it off, add a touch of social media magic to your site (check out addtoany.com) to further promote your material through the social web.

Further reading

• The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras
• Why Skittles’ strategy could kill the corporate website
• Beware brand fragmentation
• 10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People
• Social Media Landscape (fredcavazza.net)

Want to know more?

It’s not easy to select the social networks you need to engage with. You can’t, and shouldn’t, be on all of them. The services listed above are only a suggestion. More services exist for other types of content. They are, however, market leaders in their field. For now. A new rising star can take over the leadership position within a year. And we haven’t touched on Facebook or Twitter yet. Get in touch if you would like to discuss how to reposition your content, or how to benefit from social media at large.