Social media has exploded on to the scene in the past couple of years with user generated content and instant interaction forcing site owners to re-think both their site’s content and how they communicate with their audience. Social news e.g. DiggGetting a website ranked highly on sites such as Digg has been known to send so much traffic that sites have crashed under the weight. Their users submit links and stories to the site with other users voting and commenting on them. The more times your site is “Dugg” the higher you are ranked. Social network e.g. Facebook, My Space, BeboProfile pages on social networks can help to develop a dialogue with your audience and spread the word amongst the network’s users, but before you commit yourself ask why would anyone want to be your website’s ‘friend’ and how will you make sure the content is fresh and worth reading? If you have a good answer to both of these crack on, if not don’t set one up just for the sake of it.
Become a Social NetworkAccording to Hitwise, “Social networks now account for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits and 1 in every 5 page views. Only search engines receive more UK Internet visits than social networks.” This is only set to continue as the social networks targeting specific niches explode on to the scene catering for the personal tastes and interests of users in a way the large generic social networks can’t. The niches within the niches of topics such as music, cooking, travel, web design, sport, fashion, geographic locations, science… etc are all up for grabs. There is nothing stopping you grabbing a large part of that pie. Micro blogging e.g. TwitterThe new kid on the block creating waves, Twitter’s proposition is incredibly simple; in no more than 160 characters send your followers a message. The unique power Twitter has is the immediacy of a message’s impact. Your ‘tweet’ is sent to all your followers instantly, making it very useful to communicate blog updates, special offers, start a conversation, run a poll... and see results within a matter of minutes or hours.
The danger the service runs is overuse or misuse from companies literally spamming users so much they become apathetic to message and even opt out of the service altogether. Tweets such as “It’s another great Friday” from a business are a step towards being removed from people’s lists. (Find out more about the Scoosh View on Twitter)
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Centre of Therapy