Website – Designing For Social Experience

The expectations of online experience in 2010 are very different from just ten years ago. Social media is now taking the lead on how we interact on the newly emerged platforms and creating sophisticated channels which provide unique, interactive and information exchange experiences.

Designing websites as a social media tool for rich, two way user engagement means providing a versatile portal in today’s fast moving environment for static, mobile, multi platform content sharing spaces.

The impact on how businesses might view their existing site and how it can now find a meaningful role in adapting to the needs of today’s consumer demands cannot be underestimated. The way online marketing is conducted in reaching out to the social networking domains is the key issue for today’s eCommerce and service provider enterprises.

They need to find the right voice to speak to their segment of the marketplace and attract brand identity engagement. To do this they must understand the different demographic user behaviours, their preferred channels and what they are looking for at any given time.

Whereas older age groups might be strictly concerned with searching for straight information, sites aiming at the young professional in their 20s and 30s will have to both understand the preoccupation with social network sites like Facebook and their immersion with the look and feel of online brand design, to help elicit positive feedback beyond notions of ‘push’ marketing strategies.

The undoubted increasing takeup of mobile internet, and the use of mobile apps has also far reaching significance for websites that need to address a particular target audience according to product or services.

But across all age divides, for a website to succeed today, it has to be now intrinsically social as users will most likely be engaged in some form of online community and will wish to share information – if you give them the right tools, such as Twitter, to share content.

Integration is ‘everything’ today. That is, as a result of the number of platforms and networks on which people are searching for information, an audience visitor needs to be retained along the journey. A carefully constructed link building campaign should connect a blog to website, to Facebook, to Twitter, to mobile …etc .

The existence and relevance of today’s website is dependent on delivering a much expanded interactive experience in order to maintain optimum performance for visitor, audience and search engines, alike. It is now imperative for businesses to really get to know their audience, be where they are and provide two way engagement in a linked up trail of social communication.