Ways to improve your websites interactivity

A website that is interactive can help you in a lot of ways.

An interactive website can help keep people coming back to your website, help keep people ON your website and encourage visitors to share their opinions.  A popular method of interactivity is social media functionality.  This can help spread news of your website around the social web, get people tweeting and liking your content.  But it’s not just that easy, of course your content needs to be something people would be inclined to “share”.  Interactive content is often called “sticky content”.  Examples of these are: Games, Videos, things that people come back to, things that keep people on the page.

What can you do to add more user interactivity to your website?  Here are some ideas:

(Some of the links are for wordpress, however there are a large number of plugins and addons for other platforms that may do the same job, so just look them up!)

Embed your twitter/facebook into your web-pages

https://dev.twitter.com/  – Twitter

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/ - Facebook

Add a facebook/twitter comment option to your site:

Facebook Comments plugin,  All Social Sites Comment Plugin, Twitter mentions as comments

Create a quiz (Encourage people to share their scores)

A quiz can be a great way of finding our more about what your audience knows and what they don’t know, what you could teach them, people like to test their knowledge on certain subjects.  Game, Tech, Celebrity quiz’s can do quite well, there are not that many well thought out quizzes for these topics that are “embedded” on consumer sites, there may be on “quiz sites”.  But not on sites that are not specification made for posting regular quiz’s to. Website Quiz (Embeddable)

Create an animation or a video for people to see how your website works or what it is about

A video can help people to understand your product/website/service better, it can impress people if done well.  It can make people think differently about you.  It can make more sales.

Create controversial titles

Content that is controversial could make people tweet/share your content on social media, forums and blogs.  Controversy is what gets people talking, and gets people commenting

Add a “share this” plugin to your website

You can use this with most social sharing and bookmarking websites http://www.addthis.com/.

Create a survey:

A survey can help you to understand what your audience wants, what they think about your website/product/service what might make them spend more money/time on your website and more. Survey Monkey

Create a competition where entrants must interact with the website

Add a paywithatweet script to give something away with twitter payment:

The user has to tweet to their followers to get access to a download, or a link etc.. http://www.paywithatweet.com/

Add a page rating plugin to your website

Your readers can tell you how much they liked the post by rating it! http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-star-rating/

Speak Personally to your audience

Your audience like to know who is speaking to them, they respond to personal conversations, don’t be afraid to ask your readers to share your content (hey look I did!).

Mobile version to your website

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/

Add a wibya toolbar

A toolbar which you can add to the footer of all of your web-pages that has all sorts of features.  http://wibiya.conduit.com/

Amazon Astore

If you have an Amazon affiliate account you can create an “a store” for certain products that is embedded in your website, you can also add other widgets the same applies for a lot of other affiliate programs too. https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/

Add a game with leader-boards

Games can get pretty popular fast, it just depends if you have the right game! You can actually get a lot of interest around your game if it is of a reasonable standard there are plenty of sites that are set up to review your game for free.  However the best games may need time/effort putting in, if the game is not the focal point of our business then this could be a problem.

Contact form  

Encourage people to contact you through the form:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Create a social poll: Quipol - Embeddable (Works with facebook and twitter and allows commenting)

Add a feedback widget: UserReport

Very powerful and sexy too. www.userreport.com

Subscribe to comments

People who comment on your posts are subscribed by email to any more comments people make on that post.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments

Hopefully this gives you lots of ideas to making your website more interactive, you should remember that unfortunately content alone is not always enough, even the big players use lot’s of interactive tools to keep people engaged.

If you liked this post please tweet it, Tweet
And follow us on twitter Follow @YoungWebBuilder

Thanks
Oliver