Helping Visitors Interact With Your Website
Engaging visitors and giving them the freedom to comment on, and share content on your website via various social media is becoming increasingly important – I’ve listed a couple of my favourites at the end.
Tools like Twitter, Stumble, Digg and Facebook are no longer ignored as passing fads or fashions. Youtube is up there heading towards Google traffic in terms ofvolume of searches, and Facebook is now reaching incredible numbers of website visitors around the world. (Two of the guys who rowed in this year’s Cambridge / Oxford boat race certainly did quite nicely out of it!)
Social media certainly looks like it is here to stay, and the interactivity, which allows users to comment on, rate, and publish their own content instantly online makes this an extremely powerful medium.
I’ve heard a lot of things about a lot of social media recently, one of them being that Facebook will soon be approaching over 1 billion members. Seems a big number to me! Whether there is any truth in it or not, the fact is still the Facebook is now a massive part of people’s online experience. A lot of people say that twitter is reaching the top of the curve and may even be on the downward slide, but it is still a huge part of what people do online every day, every hour and every minute.
Bearing all the above in mind, it certainly makes sense to provide as much interactivity as possible on your own website or blog. There are many tools available to enable you to integrate these types of services on your own website with the minimum of technical knowledge.
A couple that I use on my own site and blog (Bournemouth Web Design) are:
- add this-is a tool that with the minimum of setup allows you to place an icon on your website or blog, which will enable visitors to share your content via websites such as Digg, Facebook, twitter and buzz.
- disqus -this is another kind of social media hub that I came across online, which allows you to pull commenting from your blog or website, and link to your Facebook, twitter and other social media accounts instantly.
the debate about whether social media is beneficial for any business website now seems to be a non-debate, it just seems to be a question of which particular social media is best for your particular business.
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