Social Network Integration

There's no getting away from social networks when you're online now. Even the most standard sites such as the BBC are all over social networks like a house on fire.

Why is this?

Well it's all about free promotion and creating a presence when you're online. By various websites being connected to a social network, they're instantly accessible to a world of over 50 Million users (Facebook) and a growing Tweety generation through Twitter. With almost the equivelant of the entire UK population online through Facebook across the world, there's a massive potential to gain access to an endless array of people from all sorts of backgrounds, enableing advertisers to target specific groups and get maximum benefits.

As more and more users post up their details to Facebook to share with their "friends", advertisers are now able to pick out specific infomation and change their displayed adverts according to your preferences. For example, if you're single, you'll gain many adverts for dating agencies, if you're itnerested in fish, you may get scooba diveing ads.

My current project is to create and produce a website for my friend Lucy. As I was never able to finish the site I began for her, I will now use this project to complete it for her, including links to social networks. But which social network is best to use?

Well Lucy already had a facebook and Myspace so it would make sense to utilise these. However, Myspace doesn't really make it very easy to post that content on other pages in the same way you can run your RSS Tweets from Twitter across multiple platforms. Therefore, I'm going to try and steer clear of Myspace due to it's inaccessibility. However, I will use Myspace's idea of being able to broadcast music to your listeners. I'll be creating a mini music device in flash for Lucy to show off her work.

To keep her site up-to-date and relevent, I would like to create a blog feature, but I am unsure as to how I'll do this as of yet. Instead, I will deffinatley try to incorporate her facebook updates and twitter feed as this will keep users up to date, even if the website isn't kept on top of.

By utilising the social network industry, I'll be able to keep Lucy's fan on top of what's happening as they'll have easy access to her reguarly updated sites. This will keep her fans interested and continue their support and come see her when she's off to do a gig.

Displaying her updates directly onto the front page is important as it's current and instant, however I will not be making it a massive element, due to the temptation from users to click off her site and visit Facebook, rather than exploring her website.