Maximise niche social network’s impact, based on page views [kwiqq]

Posted on | August 18, 2009 | View Comments

A lot can be learned from public facing successful social networks. For the purposes of this blog we will take three of our customers who will remain anonymous, sufficient to say these three customers get over million unique visitors per year. Remember these are niche communities and their main motivation is to increase sales and marketing and not be the next Facebook. Equally they want to get maximum attention from their target audience and search engine is an important aspect of their strategy.

Key learnings from our research:

Most visited pages

The most important page for a website certainly is it’s home page, 9.45% to 25.55% of page views on the site will be attributed to the home page. Followed by login page, where 4.22% to 14.74% of page views will be made.

These pages are followed in popularity by a specialist search page, i.e. searching based on your niche: image, holiday, car etc attributing to 5.37% to 13.98%.

The visit of pages vary from one social network to another,  although typically you will find: user profile (6.70% to 7.29%), forum (5.91% – 12.95%) and normal search (4.87% – 9.02%) to be one of the most popular pages.

Having this knowledge clever things can be done with niche social networks to maximise it’s marketing impact on end users.

Social Networking Tips

Some of our tips and tricks to increase your competitive advantage:

Home page is an opportunity to sell

Many public facing niche social networks  feel that Facebook like home page is in fashion and perhaps developing a simple content-poor home page (if I can call it that) is the way to go. I guess you are right if you are a recognised social network with a user database like Facebook, if not we would recommend having a home page buzzing with latest activity.

Niche search for niche sites

From a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point of view a page should be dedicated to niche search. For example if you are a car social network, there should be a page dedicated to car search. Obvious but you will be surprised how many social networks search on users only, ignoring the actual niche.

Our suggestion is to have two types of pages, one dedicated to the users who are uploading the content and other to the actual niche. On the left hand-side we have a screenshot of community website of people living in East Hampshire . The niche in this case is of people who live in the county i.e. dentists, doctos etc. But also it has all the events, popular locations and public amenities.

Users will spend considerable amount of time on these pages, hence it is in community owners interest to make these pages as favourable and content rich for the end user as possible.

Profiles and forums

These sections are obviously content rich but also rank very well on search engines. It’s in community managers interest to get as much data indexed from these sections of the site on to search engines as possible, obviously only if you are a public facing website.

A good way of getting search engine spiders indexing your popular sites is to include popular profiles previewed on the first page. In addition latest forum topics featured and refreshed on your home page would help increase forum’s visibility.

Twitter: @rajanand and @kwiqq

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