Would you like to know who is on your website?
When visiting sites, would you like to see who else is there at the moment? Be able to talk to them?
Today most sites are still not social. We have separate Social Networks for that. But companies everywhere are losing out of a huge marketing opportunity.
Your site is a Live Event
People are visiting your site to learn about your company’s products and services. Depending on your marketing, at some points in time there will be anywhere between 2 to 200 or even 2,000 people looking at your site at the same time. That is the equivalent of having a party on your screen!
Click & Tweet!
While this party is all about your company’s products and services, you do not let anyone see who else is also in the room. You don’t offer any social activities and don’t give them a reason socialize.
Most sites operate as either Online Brochures and Vending Machines. Providing useful content and unlocking some in exchange for lead generation is essential to identify qualified prospects.
But what if you also invite visitors to:
- Participate in live Accumulated Surveys and Polls – where they can see how they do in relation to all respondents and various sub-segments. These can go on forever, accumulating ever more data, making them more and more useful for visitors.
- Participate in live Trivia Contests – testing their knowledge about the topic of the products and services that you are selling. With a countdown clock, the participant who get the most answers correctly will win a discount on your product or additional services.
- Participate in live Creative Contests – invite participate to create relevant content as contest entries. For example, if you sell sandwiches, visitors could create their own sandwich ideas. The most-voted entries will win prizes, anything from gift certificates to free meals. With the right creative contest idea, this can be used in any industry. Need ideas? Visit our Creative Contest Ideas blog >>
In order to participate in any of these (or other) activities, your web visitors will have to Sign In either by email or with any of their favorite social network (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Once they do that they will be able to participate and also be able to see who else is currently on your site.
How to manage online chat
When discussing this topic management often worries about the mess that will happen when you allow social chat on their site. Here are a few ways to manage this process:
- Social tab – A tab on the side of the site can mention that there are x number of people online right now, 3 live surveys, 2 contests and x other activities. Sign in to see who’s here right now and participate.
- Sign Up – to enter the room, visitors must state why they are here / what they are looking for.
- User display – show basic info about them (for example, Name, City, or occupation).
- Only 1:1 chats – A visitor can only have one chat at a time with another visitors. There is no common chat for everyone at the same time. That often becomes a mess
Once you implement this process and activities on your site, as the administrator, you will begin to see a lot more marketing results immediately. The flood gate will open to an on-going marketing intelligence:
- Who’s on my site – by incentivizing sign in you will see people actually signin in, which on the admin panel will tell you in real-time who is on your site and what they are looking for.
- Learn what visitors think of your products and services – as visitors chat with each other on the site you will be able to get a sense of what they think of various aspects of your products or services. This can be limited to provide various levels of privacy for the visitors, or you can have a large sign saying that this is a public place and privacy is limited. It is possible to make chats private and only gather general meta-data for sentiment analysis, but that is your choice.
- Perpetual Branded Social Activities – visitors who enjoy participating in various engaging activities on your site (or app) will come back regularly to see their progress. They will also get email notification if they choose to (or push notifications on their phone). They will share their contest entries with friends to get votes to win prizes or just as a point of interest. Running various engaging social activities on your site / app will grow your audience and provide you with manay valuable insights.
At digital agency Giant Step we have been developing ComicReply as a marketing engagement platform that helps companies move into Social Sites. There are various components to make this happen but the most important part is to have Engaging Social Activities that are relevant for your prospects and customers.
The ComicReply platform provides the generic infrastructure for a Social Site with Creative Contests, Surveys, Chat, User Management and more. It can be implemented into any site but requires original creative concepts for making it wow visitors and provide a great on-going experience.
On our blog we are featuring original creative contest ideas for marketing many products and services. You may find useful ideas for your business there.
If you are interested in breathing some life into your website by making it a Social Site, contact us here:
ComicReply
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