Attributes of Social Media Tools for Integrating Them to Your Website

Are you still struggling to understand attributes social media tools that can help you increase the customer interaction while integrating your website and the social media tools? Better late than never. Let’s go through various attributes of social media tools and know which all tools have them.

1. Sharing Feature- Through sharing feature you can share the content of your companies websites to your social network. You are free to use the Share this or Add this feature as many social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube offer this. This feature helps in driving traffic to your website.

2. Embeds and Widgets- This lets you embed the feature of the tool on your website. This brings to real social interaction to static corporate websites. It is useful for real time customer interaction. However, you have limited control over what is being said. Also, the look and feel of the embed should match the look of your website else it will appear like a patch. YouTube Widget, Facebook Fan Box, Twitter Widgets and LinkedIn Third Party are the examples.

3. Authentication without registration- With this attribute, one can login to your website using login ids of social networking tools. With Twitter Connect, you can do this with two clicks. Users usually dislike filling registration forms again and again. Hence this attribute ensures increased traffic. However, it is difficult to collect the email ids of the visitors and hence data collection is not easy. Also social media tool gain more control through this. Facebook Connect, LinkedIn OAuth and Twitter’s OAuth are the examples.

4. Cross publishing from websites to social media tools- Using this feature, a user can inform some or all friends on social network about what they published on the blog or the website. The user can choose the friends with whom the content information can be shared. This leads to rapid sharing of content and can even lead to related features like activities and actions. However, this leads to disparity in the collected data and hence difficult for brands to control. Also the users should not be spamming all their friends about all the published content. This feature is supported by Facebook, LinkedIn (via REST APIs) and Twitter (with third party tools).

5. Real Time Updates- The corporate website gets updated in real time with the content on social media tools. This can also be done vice versa. However, all the content may not be relevant to be displayed on the website. Also excess of updates will make the webpage look crowded. Hence this feature should be used for key events and important customer interaction and not all of them. This is available with Twitter and LinkedIn (with REST API’s)

6. Social Personalization- This attributes means providing selective content to a user based on his profile information and behaviour in the past. Thus based on his profile on social network, the user gets a customized experience instead of generic experience. However, this leads to a series of customized content types which is costly and difficult to maintain. Also what is mentioned in a customer’s Twitter or Facebook profile might not be relevant for your business. Twitter provides access to all the profiles and selective behavioural data. Facebook and LinkedIn also offer this feature.

7. Social Context- Through this attribute, you get real time information about a customer based on the behaviour of his friends. This leads to increased relevancy of content and product suggested to a user’s friends and increased rate of action. This is a complex system which might be misleading at times as users might say something they do not like. You need to believe that your company is a media company to make this successful. This is again supported by all the three- Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (through articles they tweeted about).

8. Application Platform- Last but not the least is if the particular media tool support creation of third party applications using their network API’s and data. Companies can use this attribute to create applications with unique features which may lead to increased customer interaction. However, one needs to have expert web developers who understand your business. Getting such application created is also a costly affair. You need to hire resources in your team who have the required skill-sets and ascertain long term budget for it. LinkedIn’s OpenSocial is a typical example of this attribute. Facebook and Twitter also have this.

You must have noticed that we are talking about both merits and demerits of each of the features. One must understand that requirement of each industry is different. There should be analysis of strengths and weaknesses while designing a strategy.