Take a look at our tips below, and hopefully you will be in a better position to exploit the social media market for your business.

Blog
Your company blog is the primary starting point of all social media success. As the driving mechanism for attracting website traffic, your site SEO can immensely improve with regular content. User-generated content is highly engaging, and produced regularly and becoming in-demand, you will soon obtain regular subscribers to your RSS feeds.

Social Networks
There are millions of them out there, not all containing the right audience and appeal for every business. The main attractions are Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but not all of them offer the marketing platform your business needs.

Facebook demands highly interactive and regular content flowing through a fan page. In comparison, Twitter is an easy tool for establishing followers, for whom to advertise your content to in the hope of being distributed further. Linkedin remains the more corporate of the three, creating an ideal location for marketing the profile and individuals of your company.

Multimedia
User-generated content such as videos and graphics are the most popular type on the web. Content needs to be engaging to ensure users return, but also redistribute. Virals have become a driving point for many marketing agencies looking to ‘spread the word’ of a brand. Adding essential characteristics such as humour and controversy will ensure the message reaches a larger audience.

This can be achieved using a brand channel within YouTube and feeding content through the company blog so that the content can be easily distributed via your RSS feed.

As the first instalment of a two-part post for social media, we will reveal essential tools for monitoring social media to ensure desirable brand reputation is maintained next week.

The user’s journey begins on the home page after arriving via the search engine. A common user will have an idea of what they want or need, therefore won’t be looking to spend too much time flowing through your website.

People don’t visit every page and the majority also skim text to obtain the key information they require.

The navigation needs to be plain and simple. Use simple words that explain precisely what lies behind each link. Users will lose patience with a website that sends them to pages that consist of nothing related to what was being advertised.

Make it easy for users to see what their next step should be. Include clear calls to action on every ‘business’ page that jump out at the user. You can omit them on secondary pages that just provide information.

Try to ensure your HTML page titles are valid and relevant. This is not only useful for SEO, but for users who bookmark your website. Choose a favicon that stands out next to those of competitor sites that users are likely to visit and bookmark alongside yours.

Our last tip would be to create regularly updated features such as a blog, ensuring an RSS feed is available for subscribers. Try not to bombard users with sales messages, content such as this provides greater value in the long term.

Hopefully these initial factors can help you identify essential elements of your website navigation. Want to talk more? Keep in touch via our Twitter account @themediacube.

The Guardian remains the most popular UK newspaper website, with 36m visitors during January. Figures for last month show traffic to guardian.co.uk dropped marginally by almost 3%, however it has been the most visited UK newspaper site for the past four months.
Mail Online was the second most popular site, attracting 35.9m users, being up more than 9% on December’s figures and enjoyed the highest average daily unique users, 2.2m, followed by The Guardian with 1.9m.

ABCE has introduced daily average figures into the multi-platform report after titles such as The Guardian and Mirror called for the industry to focus less on monthly users.

All digital newspaper sites have increased the amount of traffic compared with last month, and 2010 proposes a successful period for readers making the transition from print to digital. The Times online has realized this and is set to introduce a paywall this spring.

The web allows for digital interaction. Features including forums, blogs and polls have meant that readers are more intrigued by the prospect of adding their own value and opinion online. The rise in social media and the willingness for further news feeds, means that there are more valid sources than ever, with some even dismissing these big news sources for smaller more responsive ones.

The influence and power from the press is changing. With millions of people freely staring up their own news sources via blogs and forums, newspapers will soon have to ditch the old methods and look further into the digital world.

The continuing decline of traditional media, such as print advertising, means that more emphasis can be placed on the development of online advertising. Blogs and online news sites have become increasingly popular, proving credible sources for information and convenient for regular updates.

With the internet well and truly destined towards advertising success, brands are eager to lay out foundations for progression. Online video advertising is still in the early stages, with brands exploring the constructive impact on their audiences, compared with TV ads.

Brand communications are moving away from offline, with focus now predominantly being online. One major factor that has influenced this change is the success of Twitter. In a year where major news stories were reported first online, such as the quick fire reporting of Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter, brands are beginning to realise the potential impact that social media has on worldwide communication.

This will be the year of integrated online and offline communications, driven both by the changes in consumer behaviour that we have witnessed in 2009, and the need for marketers to find increasingly measurable and effective ways to communicate with their key audiences.

In 2010, online media trends are set to continue and gather momentum. For marketers and brands alike this presents a whole range of opportunities, not least through the use of online video and social media.

Need advice or help setting up your social media campaign or online video advertising for 2010? If so, drop us an email and see how we can implement a strategy designed around success.

It’s believed to be in the final stage of talks with OneRiot, a real-time search engine that aggregates results from social networks to integrate real-time results into its existing search engine.

With the face of online search changing, it is clear that Yahoo felt pressure to provide an equivalent answer to users, or risk being left behind in the new social search wave. By teaming up with OneRiot, the search engine will provide users with access to relevant news, videos and blogs from social networking sites.

Last week Microsoft and Google both announced partnership deals with Twitter to include its results on their platforms, but Yahoo appears to be looking elsewhere for its own proposal.

A Yahoo representative said, “Real-time search is important and we’re currently conducting several tests designed to discover if showing such content is useful to people using Yahoo! Search.

“Yahoo! is focused on creating the most innovative, easy-to-use and valuable search experience for people, and after these tests we will carefully evaluate whether we should integrate such results for everyone using Yahoo! Search.”

Yahoo is placed second in popularity rankings of search engines after Google. Google remains the untouchable market leader, boasting a 77.78 per cent share of users and it remains to be seen how the balance of power will be affected by the social search revolution.

Interested in building an effective social networking campaign for your business? Why not get in touch.