Powered by the new and dynamic force of social media, the world is more connected that ever before. Social media tools have become an essential tool toward the overall success of both small and large business website. In this article we will discuss why should you incorporate social networking tools or at least start proposing them to your company. Also we will explore ways of engaging your users, generating more traffic and interest into your site using cutting edge, and effective online tools.
In the past businesses have relied on conventional media to market their products, today however it is essential to start adopting all possible tools and techniques that make products on your site visible and easily accessible to the community. Social networking tools such as Twitter, Blogger, RSS feed, etc. are some of the cheap and quick ways to get started. Most social networking tools are free or relatively cheap and quick to create, more importantly, these tools create an online market visibility to your business and hopefully will generate more traffic on your site. One may ask, how would I know that social networking will be the right avenue to take for my business. There is no clear answer, there are a number of free site metrics tools that can measure traffic information on the sire and generate fairly adequate reports such as Google Analytics.
Now we have agreed that social networking is essential to your site, let's think about how to start social networking. To start with state your business goals, the goal for an informational site for a small start-up might be to increase traffic on the site. While the goal for a functional and interactive sports site might be getting users to make an action and purchase game tickets on the site, it may be as simple as getting users to view your posts for an informational site or as my friend calls it "brochure" site. Based on your business goals, choose the most suitable social networking tool such as blogger, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc. and empower your employees to express their passion and genuine enthusiasm about your products for example. This is a relatively cheap and quick way to create more online visibility and generating more traffic- a positive traffic hopefully.
A more involved technique to incorporate social networking into your site is to develop functionalities that connect your site with mainstream social media sites. Facebook Connect for instance allows you to connect your application with users facebook profiles, allowing friends, and groups of such users to see the feed, which in turn means more visibility to your site. This will require some development but the return of investment of such solution is tremendous because it will boost up the number of visitors on your site, increase your business market visibility in the community. For some clients the return of investment can be a "risk of inaction" to emphasize importance of social networking today.
