Social Network Marketing Part 2 (continued): Specific Applications for Education Websites (article 2 of 2)

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In the previous post, I started a list of applications that can help you offer your own social networking web site. Here is the remainder of this list:

RSS feeds - The previous section discussed offering a blog with specialized content. The companion application to the blog should always be an RSS feed. Beyond syndicating that blog, you should also consider syndicating any other content on your site that makes sense. Other possible content that could by syndicated could be articles, publication notifications, and other similar content that is generated through your web site.

email notifications with sign up - An important, but often overlooked, part of social network web sites is how email is used. An effective social network web site reaches beyond the pages of the web site out to other sites (through RSS feeds for example) and includes people's email boxes. This keeps users engaged and continually coming back to be a part of the social aspects of the site. So along this line of thinking, your web site should enable people to sign up for email notifications when new content that they would be interested in is posted to the web site. Even better, you should allow people to sign up for specific types of content, or specific parts of the site, so that they only receive the information they are interested in. When new content, such as a blog entry, or new article, is added, subscribers should automatically receive an email notification that content they are interested in has been posted. Use these preferences as indicators/measures of what areas of your site are of the most interest to your web site visitors. This web site shows an example of this. If you set up a user account on this web site, you have complete control over what email notifications you receive and you can indicate that you want a note sent to you whenever we post a new blog entry. Our clients also have additional settings depending on their project. You can turn the emails off at any time under your account settings. If you post a comment below (you must be logged in) and if you are subscribed to this posting, you will also receive an email note. These types of applications make it convenient for your web site visitors and keeps them engaged in your web site without overloading them with information they didn't want.

del.icio.us, digg, other similar applications - I would put these into a more advanced category, but I did want to mention them to note their importance in your web site development. I'll break this out into another posting in a couple weeks, so stay tuned.

Technology note - From a technology stand point, your IT department should have the ability to set up these simple applications. Adaptive Campus has been developing low-cost, high impact sites that provide these types of applications, including the web site this blog is posted on. We use open source applications like Drupal.org, which is well-known to have been developed specifically for building social networking web sites. That is our favorite when developing sites for non-profits, but other open-source software to look into is Zoomla, Xoops, and Wordpress.

This should give you a good start on offering a social network web site that can significantly increase traffic to your web site, activity on your web site, and ultimately interest in your programs. But don't wait around too long, because people are finding their networks and sticking to them. Now is your opportunity to be the premium site in your interest group, don't waste that chance. The cost to establish a site is relatively low, so you have no excuse!