5 easy ways to increase consumer engagement on your site
As social media continues to take over the universe it’s absolutely imperative for your web site to be at the center of your online entertainment strategy. I have been hearing an increasing number of questions like. What should an engaging media and entertainment site look like? And how should it be different than other, typical online social environments? In this post, I would like to share with you 5 things we’ve learned from building Eos and the many sites it powers that may help you with your own media and entertainment site.
1) Be the site of record!
For a long time, we have been conditioned to be conservative about where our sites link to. You don’t want to lose a click through they say. However times are different now, and this is probably not the best strategy for you. Sites like Bing, Reddit, or Techmeme send people away all day long, but the users always return because they know they will get the content that they want. The truth is, fans of you brand want to know everything about your brand, so make sure you acknowledge things like YouTube, Flickr, unofficial fan sites and fan blogs. You want your web site to be the start page of your brand, not Google. Here is a good example of a start page from Paramore.net which includes event listing, Twitter, and merchandise.
2) Reach you user’s natural social habitat
Understandability, content owners have an innate desire for the consumer to stay on their sites of record. But what they might be missing out on is using social media as a strategy to drive traffic back to their site. Consumers are more likely to consume content in their natural social habitat (i.e. Facebook feed) and they are also more likely to discover them via social recommendations. Of course, this does not mean you shouldn’t adopt a premium content strategy or monetize much of your content. Externalized content can be monetized and when you do, make sure you adopt a technology platform that gives you the proper social media metrics so you can measure and adjust your media strategy as your audience grows.
3) Inspire your users to create
Have you ever been attached to something you’ve created? Perhaps a brilliant piece of code or a beautifully restored car? The creation mechanics is a powerful way to increase site loyalty and virility especially when user generated artifacts start to spread through their networks. Content hosting services such as Flickr and Vimeo play this game very well, but you don’t necessarily need to host content to leverage the creation mechanics. Allowing user to create lists, integrate with their socialsphere, or save a user’s history for them are all really simple things that can have a huge impact.
4) Allow the user to engage one another
Facebook and LinkedIn do a very good job with a user’s real-life social networking. However what they are not very good at is creating a community experience around brands or content. Of course you should utilize “connects” and leverage social payloads that come along with them. But after that, you need to allow people to engage with the content and each other by proving a social playground of sorts. If you are in music, why not give fans something better than message boards to meet other fans. And if you are in sport, why not build fantasy sport elements into your content your content? You don’t have to go as far as OMGPOP but the day you should be working toward is the day when people come for the content, but stay for the community.
5) Know your customers
Not all user are equal. If your platform offers you consumer insight via CRM or influencer reporting, you should absolutely incorporate that in the consumer front end. There is nothing that better engages the consumer than rewarding them in some way. You don’t have to build an elaborate social infrastructure with points, reputation and rewards. But being able to identify the influencers and then positively reinforce their behaviors, will make your site that much more exciting. At the very least, you can use that data to understand how consumers are using your site, and how you might be able to optmize the experience.
So here we are. It’s a pretty easy start on a broad topic. What are some of the engagement strategies you have tried on your own site and what were the results? Please feel free to comment on this post or any comments that might follow.
Cheers!
Posted by Mike Chen at 01:50PM PST
athurlouise Oct 7, 2009
Thanks. It’s a good content. I like it.