Using Social Media allows you to connect with a targeted set of pre-filtered users that already share an affinity for your product and keep your site on their radar on a regular basis.

There are many Social Media sites and these are detailed in separate headings below, but despite the marked differences they share a common set of goals. Users will ‘subscribe’ to a feed that can be a company or an interest group and will read updates posted by the feed whenever they log onto their network. In posting regular, useful updates a feed can promote a company or a service and gather subscribers in a similar way to a traditional newletter. This is the process simplified but the potential for engagement varies from network to network.

Below are a number of the key movers in the Social Media arena. This is a fast evolving area and new sites are launching, often with specialised functions or niches to challenge the larger names.

- Facebook

This is the main social network, known by everyone. It is primarily a non-business environment but a corporate page can be a good way to engage with users.

- Twitter

Also well known. The character limit placed on posts means that an element of skill is needed to ensure that effective, unambiguous communication is made but the medium lends itself to regular small updates to retain user loyalty.

- Google +

A direct challenger to Facebook, it has the backing of Google and the promise of closer integration into Google’s many other products.

- LinkedIn

This is a specialist business network to enable business professionals to ‘network’ in the business sense of the word. Limited promotion here works best for B2B businesses.

- Youtube

The internet’s biggest video-sharing network. Particularly good for brands with products / services that can be best represented in video.

- Pinterest

For visually sharing elements of the internet with like-minded people this has a ‘craft’ or arts feel and works well with Fashion, Arts brands.

Also worth considering;

Instagram –  Picture sharing network

Vine – Short-video sharing network

To most people ‘Google’ means just the search engine, and this remains the most visible part of Google’s growing number of services. However, for the website owner there are several tools that can prove invaluable in running and maintaining a website.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

This is now the preeminent website analytics tool, requiring just a few lines of code to be added to your site and giving a vast array of different reports. Detailed analysis of website visitors, pages and usage patterns is essential to running a website and refining how users interact with it. Common tasks involve locating pages with missing files, entry and exit pages, and even linking through to Adwords to identify the best time to run adverts.

Google Maps

http://www.google.com/local/add/

Google Maps is a comprehensive mapping tool that is accessible via the main search engine and is often used to get directions or locate places. Within this it is also possible to list your business in the Google Local directory. This ensures your business will appear when local searches are carried out. You can add photos, and contact details to give a full overview of your business to search users.

Google Webmaster

https://www.google.com/webmasters/

For non-technical users, there can be a lot of information on here that needs interpretating, but Webmaster is an indispensible early-warning system for potential problems with your website. Anything that may impact the indexing of your website by Google’s ‘Googlebot’ is highlighted so that you, or your web-programmer can address the issues.

Google Keywords Tool

https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool

Although this tool is primarily intended for their paid Adwords programme, the Keywords tool makes an excellent research tool for keywords to integrate into your website content, title tags and description tag.  It give an exhaustive list of which words are searched and groups them by synonyms. Careful use of this tool can give you the best ideas for landing pages and product descriptions to maximise the potential visitors.

Currently we are in the middle of a profound change in the way ‘websites’ or ‘connected information’ is being consumed by customers and users. Up until a couple of years ago, the standard user was simple to define – they would sit at their desktop computer, open a web browser and navigate to a website – often at a standard resolution.

With the rise of Mobile Devices and Tablets that is no longer the case. The consumption of Connected Information can take place at wildly differing resolutions , on websites or Apps . As such there are 3 distinct strategies being employed in today’s marketplace.

1. No change.
Although not a progressive change, this can be a valid strategy. Many tablet devices have a similar resolution to a desktop machine and many mobile devices have no problem displaying a website designed for a higher resolution with the use of pinch-and-zoom gestures. The user experience can suffer as the view point is not tailored to their device and moving around the site and navigating around is much harder. The user may however prefer the familiarity of the desktop site and all of the functionality that can be missing on a cut-down version of the site ( see below ).

2. Device / Resolution Specific Apps / Websites
Designing a site or an App for a specific device can give a tailored and highly usable experience for the user. Doing so gives the best possible version for each device, but entails a lot of work catering to each device. Making changes or updates to a number of different information silos can be painstaking and each device upgrade may also entail additional work.

3. Responsive Web Design / HTML5 Apps
Both of these are buzzwords in their respective areas. Responsive Web Design or RWD entails having a single site, as per option 1 but with technologies that allow the resizing of the site to fit the device’s resolution. HTML5 is a way of designing an app that will work across devices on a common technology platform and again offers the appeal of designing once and appearing on different devices at an optimal user level.

As you would imagine, option 3 is generally seen as The Way Forward allowing a single point of information re-formatted for the specific device and offering an upgradeable, flexible approach to presenting information to the end user. Time taken to ‘measure’ each device and format accordingly means that future changes will only require you to ‘cut once’ .