In many areas, online retailers aren’t meeting these social and interactive expectations, our benchmark survey revealed. Only 32% of retailers featured articles or blogs, 58% used customer reviews and 20% failed to give consumers the option to socially share links or products. By ignoring some of these features expected by customers, retailers are not making their sites ‘sticky’ and are neglecting the importance of viral marketing in this new socially connected web.

So what can you do to make your website more social?

• Offer blog with commenting option
• Social bookmarking – make sure that your content can be seeded easily
• Share with friends – facilitate content sharing with buttons
• Ratings and reviews – an easy thing to add, but so powerful.
• Contests/polls/voting – encourage or incentivize audience to engage and participate
• Expert panels – these provide the ability to feed great content and open discussions
• Forums – a way to serve a community that’s already there, eager to link up and share their thoughts.

Download “The Social Website Primer” eBook and start socializing your website.