Social Optimization of your website

Social Optimization of your website will require attention on three key components: Social Connectivity, Social Analytics and the Connected Experience

First Step: Generating Social Connectivity

The first step in evolving and applying a scheme is to connect your website to the social networks in a way that maximizes the number of active participants. Fortunately, most of the social networks are aware the worth in this as well, and most have supplied methods that enable websites to directly connect with them. The APIs they provide and the various routines and programs allow hosting websites to get data from, and interchange information with the social network. These routines are provided for Facebook Connect and there are other programs for Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google, and many others. You should give your users a variety of options to make these connections.

Second Step: Developing or Improving the Experience when Connected

You should greatly enhance the connected experience offered to users of your website by re-designing it for heightened socially-connected participation. This means encouraging your users to register with their social network identification, to share content and experience with their social networks, and to interact with friends while on your website. It is all about how to enable sharing by users. The key points are:

Keep users on your site for the entire sharing process, by including a sharing dialogue box on each page that can be shared, or the home page. The newest APIs allow users to make the connection and start sharing without having to leave your site.
Build a sharing experience into the user activity scheme on your site. This includes removing the need for clicks to enable the sharing process. For example, a site should suggest that users to share comments or poll results with their friends as a normal part of the process rather than asking them to click a “share” button. If they are not registered to share, then the website program will bypss this sharing option. This will increase the amount of sharing on your website.
Allow users to sign-in on the home page with their social network identities. Make the sharing part of the normal log-in or registration process, not a separate extra requirement.
Make it easy for users to share to multiple networks, simultaneously. This can greatly increase the network audience for your site.
Step Three. Develop advanced social metrics for your site

Businesses need to be able to test and measure changes in connected user activity by social networks, and make changes based on the monitoring information. Some of the major performance measures that you can use are:

Yearly and Monthly growth in traffic figures derived from social networks overall, and by from each specific social network site.
Statistics on the numbers of users that sharing content on your website
Average number of completed shares and responses to shares via messages, status updates etc. per connected user.
The mean number of referred visits and other referrals
The specific parts and features of your site which drive the highest volume of sharing activity