Interactive content and social media

Interactive content is material that encourages your customers, supporters and donors to actively participate with your content and your organisation.

Interactive content can include animations or other multimedia content that directs the user to make selections or choices that influence their experience of the content.

Main types of interactive content

In addition to the above, other forms of interactive content include:

• forums
• blogs
• information networks (such as  Twitter) and social networks (such as Facebook, Flickr and MySpace)
• audio and video sharing

The information generated from participants in these situations is known as social media.

Engaging with your customers or members, donors or supporters, via social media techniques can allow regular contact with your constituency and build and manage your brand.

Many businesses use social media as an extension of their customer service. They track what their customers are saying about them and respond promptly to any complaints. They can monitor and constructively respond to critical comments on Twitter, for example, or use that service to track comments about competitors.

Many community organisations use social media tools to spread their messages and raise funds or awareness.

Your organisation could challenge your customers, supporters or donors to develop social media content (videos, graphics or stories) that provide their own impressions of your products or cause. You could then showcase the best ideas from contributors. See social media for more information on ways to integrate popular third party social networking features into your website.

The main risk with engaging with your audience in this way is that you cannot control what they may say. Some of it may be innovative and complimentary. Some of it may be critical. Many companies have chosen to accept the criticism as part of the nature of this type of engagement and sought to learn from and manage negative feedback, rather than trying to avoid it all together.

Options for incorporating social media

There are two main options for your organisation if you  want to incorporate social media into your digital strategy. The first is for your organisation to host social media tools as part of your own web content. The second is to use established social media platforms and link or embed these on your website.

Most sites that include a blog choose to allow users to post comments or share blog posts using social media. However, before launching your own social media platforms, it is worth weighing up the costs and benefits of doing so with existing social media platforms.

For example, owners of a panel beating business might decide that participating in an existing forum for car enthusiasts, with its established audience, is a better option than spending time and money starting their own forum and trying to attract visitors to it. They could also have their own blog and link to content on it in the forum when appropriate.

However, it is also important to follow any terms of use or guidelines the forum may have about posting links or promoting commercial products.

If you choose to host social media tools as part of your own site, consider the following:

• Who do you want to attract to your site as users, how do you want users to interact with you and each other, and how you will attract users to your site?
• Ensure you provide adequate, clearly stated guidelines for users contributing to the site.
• Moderate and review contributions (often called posts) published on your website. For more information on moderation, see the moderation policy section.

See also our social media marketing section.