Making your Website More Social
Making your Website More Social
Why Social?
Humans are social beings. They thus expect the websites they visit to be social. Visitors to a website should be allowed to interact and engage with others. If not, the visitors may abandon the site.
Social Website
A social website nurtures and supports social interactions. This ability derives from the website’s design and software components. Interactions among persons with comparable tastes are facilitated by interpersonal communication. These user-friendly items are the hallmarks of a good website.
Useful Tips
Great websites take time and patience to build. To make your website more social, you need to take certain steps, such as:
- Encouraging visitors to post content
- Prominently presenting links to social sites on the homepage
- Installing social connect plugins
- Installing social network share features
- Creating and fully linking your blog to your website
- Streaming social network updates
Highlighting Social Networking Sites on Homepage
Your visitors need to easily locate the links to various networking sites. This way, they will be motivated to become fans of your site. For enhanced usability, you thus need to make the social network links on your website very obvious.
Install Social Connect Plugins
The plugins will enable users of various social networking sites to log in to your website. Installing plugins like Twitter or Facebook Connect will do this trick. Users’ activities on your site will be automatically broadcast on their respective social networking sites (Cloud, n.d.). Friends of these users will in turn be introduced to your site and encouraged to become fans.
Install Social Network Share Features
Visitors to your website will easily broadcast interesting content on their respective social network profile pages (TechMediaNetwork.com, n.d.). You can facilitate this move by installing Share features such as Tweet This or Facebook Share. Every item displayed on your site should have the Share elements.
Encourage Social Network Users to Post Content
You could request users of the various social network sites to post items on your corporate social network page (Snell, n.d.). You then broadcast the users’ material on your website. This way, you improve your company’s recognition as a brand.
Stream Your Social Network Updates
Installing features such as Facebook stream plugin and the twitter widget on your website will enable your visitors to directly access your social network updates while on your website. Should a certain update interest your visitors, they could be motivated to become your fans. Such an interactive website will surely draw fans from among your visitors.
Create and Completely Link Your Blog to Your Website
After creating your blog, completely integrate it into your website. Any content that you post on your blog will be instantaneously indexed, thereby improving your website rankings. To enhance your website’s search engine rankings and visibility, utilise keyword based categories and tags. More web traffic will in turn be attracted to your site (davgit, n.d.). Using the various social networking plugins, allow users to pot comments on your blog posts.
Summary
A social website enables visitors to interact and communicate with colleagues. Otherwise, the site is dull to visitors. To make your site social, you need to facilitate interpersonal interaction among visitors. Social media is an ideal tool for you. You could install Connect and Share features on various social networking sites, thus allowing your visitors to feature their fan statuses or to comment on your website items items through their respective social network pages. You could also create a fully integrated blog and invite visitors to post comments. Another social website strategy is asking visitors to contribute content on your website.
References
Cloud, M. (n.d.). 8 ways to make your corporate website more social. Retrieved from:
http://www.ciplex.com/pixels/2011/10/16/8-ways-to-make-your-corporate-website-more-social/
davgit . (n.d.). User-friendly web design. Retrieved from:
http://web-design-software-review.toptenreviews.com/user-friendly-web-design.html
Snell, S. (n.d.). 4 Characteristics of user-friendly websites. Retrieved from:
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/user-friendly-website/
TechMediaNetwork.com. (n.d.). 2012 Social networking websites comparisons. Retrieved from:
http://social-networking-websites-review.toptenreviews.com/
