Are you in the market to buy a new car? You can look forward to:
1. Spending an hour or more with a sales consultant, building rapport and establishing trust.
2. Working out a pricing agreement that makes sense to both parties.
3. Arranging the details and scheduling regarding the transfer of ownership of the new vehicle.
Your next step sends you into an office to sit with someone you haven’t met before to discuss financial terms, and who offers additional products not previously mentioned, and can potentially change the scheduling of the delivery and the pricing agreement.
Any time you end one process and begin another is called a transition. In the automotive business, the transition listed above can potentially destroy customer satisfaction, and it is one of the areas that dealerships are constantly trying to reorganize, to make it more streamlined and comfortable for the customer.
Social media has the potential to have the same jarring transition for the user that the sales process in the example above has for the customer.
For example, Twitter users are accustomed to very direct messages, and the entire statement needs to fit into 140 characters. Bringing a person over from Twitter to a website that has too much text, without precise descriptions to determine the worth of each portion of a website, makes for a poor transition. Someone who gets the majority of his news from Twitter is less likely to sit down and immediately dive into a 1500 word blog on a random subject.
Let’s assume you have a great website, with intense graphic use and bold coloring. Would the “Info” tab on Facebook, with its text only lists, be a smooth transition? If you have a great following, with lots of interaction from fans, the wall may be too busy to use as the default landing. That’s why Facebook now has the ability to create custom-coded tabs.
Remember where people are coming from and where they are going. You want people to come into your site comfortable. If they found you via Twitter, have a landing page designed to make a Twitter user feel comfortable. For each social media platform in which you are taking part of, you should have a custom landing page on your website that welcomes them to your site.
Companies spend lots of time making sure that the branding message across all of their different websites and pages line up visually. On top of this, companies need to make sure that they are talking to their customers in the appropriate manner that their customer has learned to expect.