6 Characteristics Of A Kick Ass Social Media Website

We’ve always been talking about how you need blogs and that you should establish trust and all the social media caboodle. But we never got to tackle much on the website. What makes a social media-friendly website?

Good question, really, considering how most people prefer to concentrate on making their website search engine optimized (SEO) instead of social media optimized (SMO).

Now, on to optimizing your website for social media, shall we?

As opposed to SEO, where you optimize the site so that search engines are able to crawl the sites easily for content, SMO is more of making the site more convenient for sharing in the social web. It’s more user-centric than ranking centric, if you think about it.

What makes a social media-friendly site? A good question. Here are some traits that a social media optimized website has:

Compelling content. This includes a compelling headline and a well-written content. You’ll have to make sure that people want to keep passing the article on to some else who they think might enjoy or learn something from your article.

Attention-calling pictures. Add pictures to your site, in the banner section perhaps? You can add images to your blog entries, too. Aside from the fact that it calls people’s attention towards your content, it also helps tell the story more effectively.

Content sharing options. Provide your readers with a multitude of options on how they can share your content. Adding popular social bookmarking site icons at the bottom of every post makes sharing easy. You can also add the option to email the link to a friend if they don’t subscribe to social sites.

Ads. Actually, no ads is more like it. Most social media site users don’t really like ads on the pages they visit. Aim for no ads on the page or at least trim down to only those relevant to your niche. If you can’t, then give your readers the option to disable the ads during their visit. The last option makes for a good compromise, don’t you agree?

Your social profiles. Don’t forget to include links to your profiles in the various social media sites you belong to. Listing those profiles on your site allows people to have a means to connect with you other that your corporate site.

Keeping a blog. You may have the main page to showcase your products and services, but it’s wise to keep a blog for everything else – press releases, how-to tips, opinion sharing, etc. This is where people will hang out to talk to you. What better way to get people to hang around more often than to give them a lounge to sit down at and chat?

What do you think? Do these elements help make your site more social media efficient? If you’ve got more tips to share, please do so over at the comments section. I’d love to hear your ideas.