Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Social Networking Best Practices... Right Now

Like the rest of the internet, things change quickly in the social media world; one day a tactic may work well, the next the same tactic may get a profile terminated, undoing the accomplishments of spent time, energy and money. Using best practices means best practices of the instant and place they are used.

Layout and other changes are made to the various social networking and social media sites every day, sometimes more than once a day. A small location shift, or new feature addition, may change user behavior drastically, and affect the outcome you seek. Each site has a different user-base and what works on one site may fail on another.

For instance, in late March 2008 there was no Facebook chat available, in April 2008 there was, and it meant users are now receiving notifications in a new place in addition to where they had been before. This affects how users interact with the notifications and the applications that send them, and in some cases changed how often and how users use specific applications. Social networks that do yet have a chat function that pulls in application's notifications may not need the tweaks to widgets or applications that Facebook may need.

No comments: