How to optimize your site socially

Having a current, professional and easily navigable website is the first step for any business these days. But traditional websites aren't enough. Today's businesses must include social aspects. At the same time, bad social capabilities can hurt more than they would help.

by Kristina Knight

But where should marketers begin with their actual websites?

Whether starting from scratch or simply redesigning, having a blog immediately available is a good way to add new content several times each week. "You can get a blog up very fast," said Richard Banfield, Fresh Tilled Soil. "You can really dial in and learn what your customers really want as kind of a beta site."

Once a dialogue is forming and you're hearing from clients, you can determine what other aspects should be considered for the site. Fresh Tilled Soil's new Rapid Web Prototyping platform includes several social options like blogs and vlogs so that marketers can immediately offer fresh content and communication. This creates loyalty ahead of the actual website launch.

From there, the company suggests optimizing your social capabilities.

"[B]ecause you have a much more distributed and transparent audience, you need to go out and find them where they are," said Dan Allard, Fresh Tilled Soil. "It requires a lot more effort and creativity. [Social networking optimization] is a way to reach the audience where they are already hanging out online."

Fresh Tilled Soil optimizes marketers existing content by feeding it from the different aggregators through Instant Messaging and email so that interested consumers receive the freshest content almost immediately. This drives the content that marketers place with aggregators like Digg or StumbleUpon onto the front pages of sites and from there, the content is picked up by search engines.

"It's a long-term effect, because this raises long-tail effects of higher search rankings," said Banfield.