How to interact with your target audience

With the popularity of social media and Web 2.0 features, website owners have numerous ways to interact with their target audience. A contact form and toll-free number are still good starting points to invite interaction, but today's consumers expect to be able to communicate with businesses in other ways as well. The more avenues of communication you open, the more customers and potential customers you can communicate with.

Not all of these options will work for every website and online business, but they all will work for some.

Contents 1 At your website 1.1 Standard features 1.2 Additional features 2 Via your website 3 At social media sites 4 See also

At your website

Standard features

• Have a contact form and/or email address with a link to the Contact page on every page.
• Depending on what you offer, provide a toll-free number for customers to call.

Additional features

• Invite site visitors to rate products you sell and to provide reviews.
• Invite people to vote on something, such as a new logo, which photo they like the best, and so on.
• Maintain a blog, post to it regularly, have your blog open to comments, and respond to comments that ask for a response.
• If you have an established audience, maintain a forum where people can discuss anything related to what you offer.

Via your website

• Invite people to sign up for a newsletter or email list. Send subscribers useful information and invite them to take action, such as to tell you their opinion about something or to use any of the interactive features at your site.
• Invite people to follow you on Twitter.
• Invite people to go to your company Facebook page or to your LinkedIn page.

At social media sites

• Create and maintain a company Facebook page. Promote the Facebook page at your site and wherever else you can.
• Create a company Twitter account and tweet about topics relevant to what your company offers.
• Create a LinkedIn account for yourself and network via this account.

See also

• Social media marketing
• Web 2.0
• How to use Facebook to market your business
• Blog marketing
• Advantages and disadvantages of a web hosting company forum