Social Media & Traditional Websites

Over the past two years we have seen a decent increase in the standard of modern day websites. In particular, there has been a move towards interactive functionality and user generated content.

Most website stakeholders are proud of their site and keen to invest in the functionality and vision that is available on the site, no matter what the objective is.

However, the winners in the web space over the past six months are not those with the best websites or the best content. The current breed of best in class web offerings has social media at the core of their offering. If the battle is for users, interactions and eyeballs, then the focus is not on your website but on your social media presence.

Whilst content is still the ultimate end game, the promotion and distribution of this content through all forms of social media is one of the primary drivers of traffic.

The web user of today has somewhere between 1 and 3 go-to websites they use on a daily / weekly basis. Be it Netvibes, Facebook, igoogle, Twitter, this is the modern day website. The user controls it and the user decides if you are good enough to be part of their online life.

In order for your website to gain traction to a modern day user, the website needs to communicate the benefits and value of its content in a manner that makes it attractive to their target audience. Once a user follows you on twitter, or becomes a fan on facebook, you now have a shop window to communicate your brand values and content. If you’re on the money, then that user will interact with your social media (share, retweet, reply) etc, and if you’re lucky they will click through to that big fancy website.

The thing about social media is that it is two-way, transparent and measurable. With the flood of URL shortners now in the market, it is simple to track content flows through the web. If you tweet a piece of content, you can immediately track how many time its been read, retweeted, location, etc. This is invaluable information and is the bedrock for future monetisation.

The two-way element of social media from a website portal perspective has yet to be grasped by most brands and websites. If people are interacting around your social media, then a community exists. By visualising this community on your own website you are demonstrating to your users that a community exists. This is powerful. If that community is occurring on multiple social networks, you are then doing the community a service by visualising all of the interactions back on your website. The current market norm is to enable the visualisation of the twitter community. However with the onset of tools that enable the search and tracking of key works on all social networks, now is the time to both visualise all of the community and interactions and to enable your users to contribute to all of this community directly from your site. Think of the brand benefits. You are facilitating your user to easily contribute to a community that they clearly have an interest in, directly under the umbrella of your own brand.

Finally, to make sure we don’t trip up, it is important to remember that social media communication is not about spamming a potential audience with ads for content. It is about adding value. Two-way interaction is a must in building up a sticky and valuable social community. For some interesting do’s and don’ts on how to manage social media communication, check out the following links: http://bit.ly/wBiX7 (Mashable, July 09) and http://bit.ly/gzoIB