Are You On The Page For Visitors To Engage?

The web 2.0 principle of informal social media engagement is established. The mobile internet is well underway. Yet a recent web study finds that the websites of many brands and businesses still do little to engage with visitors and potential customers.

This is unlikely to be the fault of their website design and marketing agency team, who would, no doubt, have presented the possibilities for today’s approach to online marketing and developing brand identity visibility. Beyond simple transaction and price comparison, the message is that a company’s  potential niche audience market needs to be attracted to online engagement or their longer term interest is diverted elsewhere.

The adoption of social interaction via email marketing newsletters, Blogs, Forums, Twitter, Facebook and site community groups tends to be reflected by market sector and possibly one sided perception of demand. For some businesses, the extent of their attempt to reach out to their potential audience may be no more than the odd newsletter once a quarterly or the one time setting up of a newspage or blog that is soon neglected and only updated a few times a year, if that!

For most SMEs, forays into PPC gobble up nearly all their available ‘advertising’ budget, generating modest response and disappointment in the short term, and thus, lack of interest in exploring much beyond basic SEO tweaking of the home page.

The study reports that while 40 per cent of the sites they looked at featured a blog, too many were not updated frequently enough, which defeats the object of the blog, as readers will quickly lose interest, search engines no longer ‘vote’ the content quality and ranking suffers as a consequence. Only 34 per cent of the blogs studied were updated on a regular basis, while just 19 per cent of businesses advertise the blog across the rest of their website.

Another report found that only 19 per cent of websites display a link to their Facebook page on their homepage, while just 15% advertise their Twitter presence, and 13 per cent any other social network profile. Meanwhile, 34 per cent of sites provide links that allow a visitor to ‘share’ content on a social network, but only 16 per cent allow the visitor to rate and tag content.

Other studies show only a third of companies featured a community on their site, while less than one in five advertise their social media presence prominently on their homepages. Only 44 per cent of companies with a community actually initiate a conversation with visitors, though more respond to queries or questions from users. The particular study reported that not a single company regularly uploads content to their community.