Integrating Social Media with Your Website

Not long ago, adding community features to your site meant the ability for users to participate in forums, chat with other visitors in a window or post comments. Internet users as a whole are a nostalgic bunch who will continue to flock to well established old sites but there is a clear elevation in the expectations of user generated content. This change has been predicated on the rise of supersocial networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Youtube.

There are many possible motivations for adding social media to your website. You want to create and build credibility or show people who you are and what you are about. When people learn about you, they begin to trust you and naturally tell others about their positive experiences. This progression has a clear tendency to snowball, until very soon you will be asked more detailed information about yourself as well as your business.

There is now a small number of companies that assist businesses, both small and large, and even the common webmaster, in creating their own community space with the features of the sites listed above. Users are given tools to create a personal profile, connect with people of similar interests, upload photos and videos and even blogging. Examples of these include Ning, KickApps, pluck, Me.com and Wasabi.

Ning and Wasabi offer the most intuitive and thorough free white label social networking solutions. Ning claims over 100,000 networks and Wasabi, 5 million users as proof of both technology and ease of use.

All of the free white label social network offerings are ad-supported with an option to remove ads with a modest monthly fee.

In my next blog I will discuss how to implement a white label social networking product to achieve you business goals.

Social Media Marketing

Social media provides many opportunities to advance your business but also opportunities to waste effort or worse, let efforts fall into disarray. In this series of blogs I will examine some guidelines for successfully growing your community and avoiding some common pitfalls.

Start with Intent

Identify what your intentions are in creating a social network. Are you hoping to improve awareness of your brand or open communication? Are you looking to reach new markets and open channels for sales or membership? Are you hoping to use these tools as collaboration platforms? Are you making informational products or are you simply virtualising your water cooler?

Knowing your intent drives which path you take.

Developing your network

Having a social network on your website is well and good but unless you invest a little energy in promoting it, the likelihood that it will ever become the active community that you desire is slim.

Rarely in history have thriving communities formed spontaneously. Major factors for early settlements included water sources, trade routes and defensible land formations. For your community to flourish you must offer some form of value which will incentivise users to stay and interact.

You can do any of the following but I recommend that you do only one, and do it very well.

1) Create short reports and updates on a personal level. These will give alway inside information, which readers will be pleased to receive.

2) Create helpful videos. Again these videos will provide something viewers want to know, in a very personal format.

3) Write and publish high quality articles.

With each of these avenues, you create a need for more information and a way to receive it. By publishing links or paths to your product, customers will have means to learn more about you and your business.

Capitalising On Success

Be sure to reward any interest that your customers have made in your social network. Respond promptly and enthusiastically and you will be surprised how fast you will build an army of followers.

Business Model

Few social networks currently charge money for membership. In part, this may be because social networking is a relatively new service, and the value of using them has not been firmly established in customers' minds.[citation needed] Companies such as MySpace and Facebook sell online advertising on their site. Hence, they are seeking large memberships, and charging for membership would be counterproductive. Some believe that the deeper information that the sites have on each user will allow much better targeted advertising than any other site can currently provide.

Social networks operate under an autonomous business model, in which a social network's members serve dual roles as both the suppliers and the consumers of content. This is in contrast to a traditional business model, where the suppliers and consumers are distinct agents. Revenue is typically gained in the autonomous business model via advertisements, but subscription-based revenue is possible when membership and content levels are sufficiently high.