Why Social Media?

Over the past few years, social media has exploded into the mainstream.  Consumer destination sites like YouTube and Facebook are some of the largest sites online, Fortune 500 brands are increasing their social marketing spend at skyrocketing rates, retailers are leveraging the power of social commerce, and nearly every media site online is filled with social tools and content. 

What do we mean, exactly, by social media?  At Pluck, we see three primary elements of the social media experience as applied to (integrated with) a destination Web site:

• User-Enhanced Content: Allowing users to enhance your original article and product content with comments, ratings, reviews and recommendations.  User-enhanced content enables powerful social discovery features and makes your entire site socially relevant. 
• User-Generated Content: Allowing users to generate, or contribute, net-new pieces of content to your site – blogs, photos, videos, and forum posts that create valuable content resources in addition to your existing article or product content.
• Social Networking: Enabling users to interact with the site and each other through vibrant user profiles, groups, messages, points, leaderboards, and a range of other features.  As the cornerstone of the user experience, social networking tools anchor your site’s social network by turning a group of users into a true community.

What are the benefits of social media for today’s digital leaders?

build site traffic

By practicing integrated social media – that is, integrating social media tools directly into your core site experience – you can gain a wealth of valuable content that drives traffic through search and other channels.  And by leveraging what Pluck calls Social Unification – allowing users to share and broadcast that social content across the social web by syndicating your community’s interactions to Twitter and Facebook and enabling viral distribution through Clearspring and other channels – you gain valuable links back to your community.  The result?  A healthy stream of new site traffic, directly attributable to the social content generated by your valued users.  And don’t forget to complement your in-house and user content with world-class, contextually relevant, search engine optimized, curated content from Pluck and our parent Demand Media.

truly connect with your audience and consumers

In today’s world, audiences and consumers expect to be able to talk back to the enterprises they engage with.  They have opinions to express about products.  They have comments to contribute on news articles.  And they have insights to share about brand-relevant topics, experiences and lifestyles.  By giving your audience and consumers a voice – and by rewarding and recognizing them through practices anchored by Pluck’s concept of Social Reputation – you’re more likely to maintain their attention, trust, respect and loyalty amidst an increasingly noisy consumer experience.

improve your bottom line

Regardless of your business model, social media creates measurable value.  Whether decreasing customer service costs through customer-powered forums, keeping users on the purchase path with ratings and reviews, building premium page inventory with high-value blogs and article comments, or delivering insightful product feedback through sponsored brand destinations, social media creates value for enterprises.  By employing Pluck’s methodology of Social Valuation, the bottom line impact of your community is measurable and demonstrable.

Social media is rapidly changing the way established media companies, retailers, and brand marketers conduct business.  Amidst the challenges, there are real opportunities. 

Pluck has helped capture those opportunities, to the tune of over 3 billion monthly social media interactions across 400+ top digital destinations.  By integrating social media into our customers’ digital destinations through our market-leading white label social media platform, enabling user-enhanced content, user-generated content, and social networking to exist and thrive on customer-centric domains, and guiding customers through best practices through our analytics and services offerings, we help enterprises transition to the new, socially-powered business environment. 

Read more about Pluck’s products and services to determine how we can become a trusted partner in your efforts to succeed in social media.