For the most part, corporate websites are pretty static that end up becoming drain that doesn’t deliver good value to visitors and prospective customers. As social networking continues to grow, having a “social” feel to your website becomes more important.
One of the biggest advantages of social networking – it’s the biggest and best word-of-mouth advertising medium you could ever ask for. Unfortunately, many websites still do not provide the capacity to share web pages and instead rely solely on testimonials, quotes and videos.
As more and more web users become “social” online and interact with their friends, you will need to factor this into your online marketing strategy. Many people look to their friends for insights and advice when they’re purchasing something – whether it’s online or in a traditional retail environment.
Continue reading for 4 ways you can make your website more social.
More interactive product reviews
Take a page from Amazon or Best Buy’s playbook, even if you’re a B2B company that sells your products through a distributor – make it simple for customers to provide reviews of the products they purchase. Replace your plain old testimonials with review functionality on product pages. Customers can help you sell by putting insights about your product right next to information you provide.
Encourage commenting
Give site visitors a sense of ownership and show that you care about their needs and concerns by allowing people to comment and share ideas. This can be as simple as allowing comments on your corporate blog to creating custom forums. Dell has a great one called Idea Storm where they gather feedback for future product development.
Allow customers to curate content
Developing, posting and maintaining a full website of engaging content can be quite the challenge. It’s time consuming and/or very costly to do. Save on this expense some and make your site social at the same time by allowing customers to submit industry related content they generate themselves or find elsewhere online. Allowing customers to do this means you’re providing improved thought leadership along with increasing brand recognition.
Make your own social network
If your site already requires customers to login to place orders or get technical support, why not make it more social? Amazon is one company that does this very well – coming about as close to their own social network as possible. Customers can login and find forums, product reviews and more. Making your “customer only” areas more social will help transition this part of your site from a place people only come when required to one where customers find real value.
As social networking becomes a bigger part of marketing online, those who implement things like this will find themselves ahead of the curve in regard to their search engine rankings – ultimately leading to more on-site activity and quality sales leads.
Tags: B2B marketing, B2C marketing, Online Marketing, social media
