Social Schmoozing

You may or may not have noticed the new website that Authority Domains launched late last week. Awhile back we posted the mock ups of the new site and posted them here. What followed was great. Our users and friends alike gave us feedback on what they would like to see. Most of it entailed user experience, while others gave us ideas on Social Media Channels. Friday was the culmination of 3 months of listening, practicing what we preach, and creating. Here is the who, what, how and why of the new site:

1. Solution Color Coding- All of our services are color coded.
2. Social Media Buttons- There are buttons to our LinkedIn page, Facebook fanpage, our eBook and a tab that leads to follow the entire Authority Domains executive team on Twitter.
3. Share This – Every page is accompanied with the ShareThis tool. This is critical in allowing our users to share our website and blog content in whatever social media channel they choose to surf in.
4. Constant Contact- We have started a mailing list/survey solution for those who opt in. This is a key “old school” marketing initiative that has not gone obsolete. Constant Contact is fantastic and is easy to plug the opt-in to any website.
5. Simple Contact Form – Complete with a pull down subject option so the user can simply choose which bucket they want to contact us about.
6. Testimonials – Past or current customers can give us kudos as they see fit.
7. Recent Blog Posts- The recent blog posts widget keeps the page up to date with recent content.
8. Recent Twitter Posts- The recent Twitter posts widget keeps the users up to date with what is important to us.
9. Bulk Class C IP Checker- A critical tool for our SEO customers.
10. eBook- Our eBook is free service that customers and prospects that are new to Social Media to think about what it can mean for their business. It is a great education tool and helps them start thinking about SM the right way.
11. Retweet Tool- We attached this to every blog post throughout our blog history.
12. Intense Debate Comments- Jeremiah Owyang spoke today about the importance of being able to login using 3^rd party application (i.e Facebook Twitter, etc). This comments solution does exactly that. Less typing to sign in will lead to more interactions.
13. Poll- We used the Vizu poll on our blog.

Although it is a small sample of time, here are some stats from the last 3 days that we are tracking as ROI for our efforts.

1. 1. Time on the site rose from 2.5 minutes per visit to 4.1 minutes.
2. 2. 5X as many visitors the last 3 days
3. 3. 1/3 more link backs as we had previously
4. 4. 25% more traffic
5. 5. 50% more registrations for our mailing list

Over the coming weeks I will monitor the stats and ultimately new business. Sorry, we can’t discuss sales-but I will comment and let you know if we are seeing a rise. Also, we are considering using other tools like RSS readers (Netvibes) as well as Tweetizen. I will keep you up to date on that as well.

Props to the Authority Domains staff on a fantastic job. I would be interested in reading your thoughts on the new site.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 6:58 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.