In the past, if you wanted to show off your new products, you’d rearrange the items in your shop window. If you wanted to update people on how a project was going, you’d mail them out a newsletter. Now that an increasing amount of business is done online, it’s important to keep your online presence just as regularly updated.
An out-of-date online presence can make you look lazy and disorganized. If you rarely update your website or post on your social media channels, you’re missing out on the chance to promote your brand. Here’s a quick guide to how to stay up to date in 2020.
On your website
Although it might seem easy to update a page hosted online, it can often be quite a time-consuming task. Unless you’re someone who is extremely confident around HTML, there’s always the fear that even the smallest alteration to your website could completely change the look of a page.
The best way to keep your site up to date is to build it around a pre-existing content management system. Choose a reliable web design company that has experience building attractive websites around very simple systems to help create your website. Developers like those at Plego have years of experience with manageable solutions like WordPress or Joomla and can produce fully customized themes and plugins. Once that is set up, you can regularly update your blog from a browser or using the WordPress app.
On social media
Now that you’ve got a website that can be regularly updated, make sure you post about it on social media. It’s quite straightforward to write a status or a tweet to update your feed with the latest news. Although we are all no doubt used to dealing with these platforms every day, often there are some things that people forget. For example, on Twitter, remember to make sure your display picture and bio reflect your brand. If you have taken advantage of the pinned tweet function, make sure you also change that tweet regularly.
On Facebook, as well as keeping your display picture up to date, it’s equally important to keep changing your banner image. If someone clicks onto your profile, this is the biggest image they’ll see so make sure it has a big impact.
On search engines
Google remains the most visited website in the world. Its power as a search engine can never be underestimated. It’s even made it into our everyday language, with most people saying they’ll “Google it” rather than “search for it on a search engine.” The search engine now claims to make multiple changes to their results every day so any updates to your website should be reflected almost immediately. It’s always important to check, though, and entries on things such as Google Maps will need to be done manually.
On email
Although email has been around for decades and changed very little since its inception, it remains one of the most popular ways of communicating online. With this in mind, try and encourage your customers, clients, or contacts to subscribe to a newsletter. Treat each new email as a blank piece of paper. Other than your brand’s logo, try not to repeat the same images in your emails. They might illustrate the text well, but they’re not telling your recipient anything new. Make the points you want to get across stand out in a big, bold font and a color that contrasts well with the background. While it might be tempting to use other media such as video and movies, this can prevent those with poor internet connections from loading the email.
