Every time someone visits your website, there is the opportunity for them to become a customer, an influencer, a brand advocate, and a natural promotional tool. Are you providing the visitors to your website with these opportunities?

One way to accomplish this is to offer visitors the chance to register using a social media sign-up. No doubt you will have seen many of the larger sites offering Facebook and Twitter sign-ups, but it is also an option which can be extremely fruitful for small to medium enterprises. In fact, many small businesses have grown rapidly because they have made themselves more accessible to larger numbers via social media sign-ups.

Let’s look at the advantages of this form of customer registration.

The biggest and most significant advantage is that it lets you create and build a solid relationship with your audience. It gives you a way to easily share and communicate with them, allowing them to get to know you and vice versa.

Time is of the essence these days, and people are tired of completing boring online forms. Social media sign-up makes registration easy, quick and far more likely to occur. Traditionally registration could take over ten minutes. Now, with one or two clicks, a visitor can be fully registered.

Social media sign-ups give you access to a wealth of information. This can be used for market research, and as a basis for inspiration for future content creation. It is how you can get to know your customers in a more personal way. This will help you to create much more meaningful, and powerful content.

You have their contact details stored – automatically. In the past, building a customer database was a labour of love that took a long time and constant care. It still requires care and attention but now, you can build a huge database very quickly indeed.

Reduce the spam. Social media sign-ups are a form of authentication. The majority of Twitter and Facebook users who use sign-up are real people, with genuine accounts. Many companies prefer using sign-up because the occurrence of spam addresses is much reduced. It won’t eradicate it but it will cut out the bulk of the rubbish.

Social media sign-ups create direct links between you and your audience. Whenever they connect with you, they are creating natural traffic and back links which are associated with your pages. This will directly affect your rankings, pushing them up as the activity and your following grows.

It’s a win-win for everyone. Your customers save time and effort, and are more likely to sign-up, and you have the opportunity to connect and engage with them on a much closer level.