A normal website such as an e-commerce site, News & Events site, Travel site or a generic portal like Yahoo, the core of the website is a product/platform that is sold to people. A e-commerce site can act as platform to Buy/Sell/Trade, a Travel portal offers access to bookings, News & events portal provides information material.
In an Online Community or Social Network the focal point of the website/business is the user and user generated content. A social website generates reputation by the quality of users/user’s content present on the site just as a portal gains reputation by the quality of product offered to website users.
The core values for such websites are:
A) The focal point of the website is the user generated content and the user himself.
B) Quality of users/user generated content is the quality of the website
C) Users/Moderators can make or break your website
B) Use Product cleverly as a tool to attract right people to use the site and increase activity.
Types of Social Networks & Online Communities.
A) Forums
B) Groups
C) Book Marking Sites
D) Content Popularity Sites (Digg, etc)
E) Answers
F) Social Networking
G) Professional Networking
H) Specialty Search Engines (video, Photos) Like Youtube, Flickr.com
Traffic to Social Media Sites
B) Word of Mouth Marketing
i) Blogs
ii) Marketing on Other Social Network Sites (Facebook)
iii)Viral
iv)Link Baiting
C) Targeted PPC advertising (very small scale)
D) Product Offerings: This is basically generating gadgets, applications which can be used in external sites and help drive traffic to your website.
Traffic From Social Media Sites
It is true that you can receive huge amount of targeted traffic for Free from Social Networks, this is possible only if you can spend lot of time and effort in each of the social network.
It is important to build reputation on your profile in these sites to drive targeted traffic.
If your business receives good amount of traffic from other social network sites then you must be aware that traffic flow is not consistent over a period of time. There will be spikes in traffic graph from social network sites.
Social Media Marketing
Social Network is a place where users posts content (textual, video, other) about various topics under predefined categories. There is generally a moderator or an algorithm, which monitors activities and gives prominence to few stories/user generated content. Moderator also starts discussion or edits the thread on any topic.
A) Content is clearly divided into Communities, Categories or Tags
B) Tagging is very essential. Location & Keyword tagging are 2 main important tags
C) All pages to have static urls as the content posted by users can rank in Organic results.
D) The Title, Category Heading, Breadcrum trail, Number of Views of the content, Content Url and links in the content post are essential for organic ranking.
E) If right content is not getting exposure the moderator has to work to ensure they get maximum views. Bring them on Home Page or link from relevant other pages.
F) The features and tools must be designed to get right content on Top of user attention.
G) To know the value of social media site,
i) Find the top number of views for any content or category.
ii) Find the number of users on each category at any point of time
iii) What is the average posts per user on each category
iv) Find the top 20% of the users posting maximum posts/threads. The same goes to rating content as well.
H) Moderator/Algorithm must choose the Content, Urls to be placed in the home page of the site.
I) Sharing the content is very essential, Users should be able to share any content with their friends.
J) Having a Personalized and customizable user profile is very essential.
K) Rating of Users by different level of activity on the site is good feature.
L) User Voting on the content is important aspect of the website.
M) The best content or Top Viewed/Rated Content must be clearly highlighted.
N) Users could be stalked by other users. Send a Add a friend request to other users.
O) All the content on the site to be made available to search engine crawlers.
P) Link back or track back Urls are essential. giving a link to posts which link to this content.
Q) In Q & A, giving rating to answers, users, and choosing a best answer is very essential.
R) Commenting is another most important aspect of the Social network. Giving a comment on every post increases the overall content on that page, helps it rank better in site search as well as organic web search.
S) Sending personal messages to other users is an important feature.
T) The user profile must exist in unique static Url which can be shared, linked from elsewhere on the web.
U) RSS feeds of user generated content is important. Users must be able to subscribe to other user generated content.
V) Including a plugin code which can help embed user generated content into an external blog, website is a useful tool.
W) The website must be able to assess the semantic relevance of the content posted by user and associate a relevant category or a tag to it.
X) The content posted by user should be sent as feed to various other vertical search engines and meta search engines.
Y) Every location or geography must have unique domain and contain local content.
Z) On every content page there must be links to other similar content.
AA) Marking a content as favorite is essential.
AB) Generating Quality Traffic & exposing Quality content. Both are reciprocal, you need to expose quality content to users and search engines and hence attract quality users to site.
AC) Moderator must be experienced and very good in promoting the right content.
AD) Users must be able to Bulk edit and manage the content submitted by them.
AE) License for every content submitted is essential
AF) Giving a number on every element based on its activity is very essential.
i) Number of Views of a content.
ii) Number of Votes to a content or answer.
iii) Number to every user based on his level of activity.
iv) Number of Comments on a content.
v) Number of Friends to each user.
vi) Number of webpages linking to each content.
vii) Number of categories, tags through which you can find this content.
viii) Number of Favorites for this content.Copyright of this article is reserved by praveenkodur.com
