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.