Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Your company’s website is not the animal it was five years ago. Whether through the incorporation of a simple sharing mechanism or some more sophisticated form of customer collaboration, the Corporate Website is undergoing a major transformation.

Here are five strategies for integrating this thing called Social into your website, in order of increasing complexity and effectiveness.

1) Social linking

Social linking is exactly what it says it is. The by now ubiquitous and rather simplistic process of linking users to your company’s social media assets (Facebook page, Twitter profile, WordPress blog, Youtube channel).

While any attempt to engage our customers in the social channels must be commended, Social Linking is in fact less effective than we might want. The primary reason for this is that you’re actually sending users away from your site, often to a third party property. And then you have to figure out how to get them back to your site.

2) Social aggregation / curation

Instead of sending users away from your site to various social media assets, Social Aggregation describes the process of sucking interesting information back into your site – think widgets and Tweet rivers. By curating information or conversations that are happening around your product or service you’re able to harness the power of peer-to-peer influence right there in your website – where the product or service lives. 

3) Social publishing

A deceptively simple but powerful strategy for harnessing the power of peer-to-peer authority. The humble “share” and “like” buttons allow for the organic dissemination of relevant information from your website within personal networks.

By including trackable, shortened URLs, you’re not only bringing users back to your site on the basis of a very powerful “friend” recommendation, but you can track where they came from too.

4) Contextual sharing

Part social aggregation, part social publishing, contextual sharing describes a scenario in which a user is able to see observe their friends’ activity around a product or service. Amazon, for example, uses Facebook connect curate reviews of their merchandise. So if I log in to Amazon using my Facebook account, I am able to see not only anonymous reviews of the books I might want to purchase, but also more importantly, which of my actual friends has bought the same book (and presumably written a review).

5) Unification 

For us this is the holy grail. Imagine that there is no corporate website, or not as we know it, anyway. Our company’s digital presence is an amalgamation of all of the above. There’s no distinction between website proper and so-called social media assets. My experience of the product or service on offer is based on my own journey along the trail social bread crumbs that I happen to be following at any given point in time. 

Finally, in creating digital strategies we always try to remember that while product information is important, what’s even more important are the people who have bought and are already using that product or service. Once we accept this, we are able to leverage their (hopefully) positive influence to bring people to our site, rather than merely disseminating our brochure-ware into the social ether in the hope that it might do some good.

A version of this article appeared in the Malaysian Dutch Business Council magazine.