Increasing brand loyalty and more sales to your company today happen not just by merely promoting your products / services but by engaging customers at a much more personal level.
Social networks utilize this basic fact by bringing your suppliers, customers, partners and your employees together to initiate meaningful discussions. For businesses, small and big, social network development can involve developing collaboration platforms for sharing information within a company or to create community platforms for customers and prospects.
Social network development
Developing a social networking platform involves more than just deciding on the technology to use or mimicking popular web 2.0 sites. A thorough study of business goals, the market and customer profiling are important factors in pursuing a social network website development project. We work with you initially to assess business motives first. This helps us to plan the right kind of application that will support the bigger objectives and is also strongly imbibed in all aspects of the development.
According to CIO.com, the top 5 reasons to develop business / corporate social networks include:
- Social Networks Build Better Customer Relationships,
- Social Networks Improve Knowledge Management,
- Social Networks Facilitates Recruiting and Retention,
- Social Networks Increase Business Opportunities,
- Social Networks Build Community.
IWD realizes the importance of connecting disparate stakeholders into a single platform; we can work with you to create powerful social networking platforms using .NET. Specific solutions that are covered in social networking development include:
Corporate networks: Corporate / Business social networks help sharing of knowledge between your employees easier. It’s not only the place where members of staff will upload their white papers, HR forms, case studies, reports, templates and media resources. It is the place where global corporate communication and enterprise knowledge are centralized.
Commerce Solutions / B2B / B2C social websites: Connecting customer groups with your company is made easier. Potential customers can connect with your business to learn how your product or service can solve their needs before making a purchase decision. This is a cost effective way of not only generating leads but also can act as a ‘pre-sales’ tactic.
Community portals: Creating knowledge communities in your industry can help you give leverage as an expert in your domain. You can deploy various community portals based on your product / service areas. By developing information communities you can create a large base of potential partners and / or customers with minimal investment.
Some common features involved in developing a social networking website are:
- User Profiles / Account Management
- Blogging
- Forums / Discussion boards
- Focused groups
- Polling system
- Private messaging / email
- Uploading media – videos and Photos
- Marketing tools such as friend invites, emailing and social bookmarking
- Commenting system
- Document management
- File management
- Granular privacy control
- Advertising
- Mobile support
- Taxonomy based information architecture
- Tagging
- RSS feed aggregation
- Ecommerce integration
- CRM / Analytics integration
- Integration with 3rd party applications using APIs
The list above is limited and varies across project requirements.
Building strong business social networks doesn’t work only if you have social network developers but also people who have an acute sense of how social networks operate as well as marketing and sales skills. IWD brings these skills to the table when work with you.
We believe .NET can change how businesses operate in the future; developing social networking websites and applications in .NET is robust, scalable and geared for the long run.
If you are ready to build powerful social networking apps for your business, get in touch with us today and we will work with you on that great social website idea. |
