It’s easy to add links to your Facebook page or LinkedIn profile to your website. It is simply a matter of adding some HTML code within your design.

Of course many of the social media sites offer widgets that will create a custom badge on your website that pulls in content from your profile. We are just discussing the basics today, getting those social media links on your site with the appropriate icons.

1. You need the images that you plan to use for your links. I recommend using images directly from the social media platform. Here are the links:

Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage/promo_guidelines.php

LinkedIn. http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1101

Twitter. http://twitter.com/about/files

YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/t/creators_downloads

If you looking for something with a little more style, please check out the enormous amount of social media icon sets found at Smashing Magazine. I like some of the sets in this post about free icon sets.

2. After you have the image, you plan to use, you will need the actual link for your profile or page. The easiest way to find the link is to navigate to your profile and copy the URL in the address field of your browser. From there, you will probably have some editing to do.

Facebook. The address in your browser bar will show additional information that you don’t need for your link. If you have a Facebook page with less than 25 followers, your link should look like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/<town>/<page name> /<string of 12 numbers>

Depending on the type of page you have set up, you may not have the <town> field. If you have at least 25 followers, then log in to Facebook, after login, navigate to http://www.facebook.com/username. Be sure to select “Set a username for your Pages.” This will give you a new simpler URL of your choice, as long as it is available.

Doesn’t http://www.facebook.com/laurabcreative, look better than http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sterling-VA/laurabcreative/26156294968?

LinkedIn. From within LinkedIn, navigate to Edit My Profile. If you haven’t already set your custom URL, do this by selecting Edit following your existing URL in the Public Profile field. Your new URL will look like this:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/<your name>

My LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/laurabpoindexter

Twitter. Twitter is the easiest site for URLs. Your URL is:

http://www.twitter.com/<your Twitter handle>

Your handle is the 15 character username. For example, my URL is http://www.twitter.com/laurabcreative.

YouTube. YouTube also has inherent URLs that are already customized. All users have channels, whether you post videos or not. You will see the URL is:

http://www.youtube.com/user/<username>

You can remove the “user” in this URL and it will still work. For example, one of my client’s YouTube channel is http://www.youtube.com/loverugbycompany.

Social media is all the rage in the marketing world, especially the small business marketing world. I know this because it is what I do and what I hold seminars on. And I talk to business owners everyday who say “oh, I already have a Facebook page”. As if that were enough. I often equate it to a decade ago when businesses thought they could just build a web site and their sales would skyrocket. We all know how successful businesses were who had a site with no strategy.

I use this blog to give you real world examples of good and bad marketing which I tag as “Brilliant” or “Daft”. This is not to highlight or criticize the companies in my example, but rather to get you to think. Are you doing something similar? How can you make it better? If it’s a good idea, can you use it in your business?

I encourage my clients and audiences to look at what is working in other industries and apply it to their business. I absolutely love this example below by a guy looking for a job in advertising…

Does that give you any ideas on what you could be spending your AdWords budget on other than fighting for those hot keywords?