With an increasing number of businesses today investing in building an active social media presence - be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. the way businesses build their websites is changing.

Increasingly, you'll go to a company website and find a Facebook widget, showing you how many of your friends like the company's FB page, or a Twitter widget, showing you some of the company's most recent tweets. There are a whole bunch of reasons why it makes sense to do this. Some of these include ensuring better ROI on SMM efforts, enabling people to connect with companies on an individual level and have conversations with them, building a long-term relationship with website visitors and others. Many sites/portals even allow you to create accounts using your Social Network profiles and that even helps companies pull more information about users than is normally available to them besides making creating accounts easier for users.

Clearly, the elements that make up a good company website are changing. But is this change limited to e-commerce/retail and general B2C websites? What about B2B websites - is there a way for B2B company to make their sites more Social - while ensuring that it maintains its corporate B2B demeanor?

Well, that's exactly what I'd been assigned to do last month. I was to work on completely revamping the website of one of company's divisions - the one that I primarily work with. This particular division focuses on Consulting and Technology and is purely B2B in its business model.

The current website, which (and there's no easy way to say this) is far from perfect has remained unchanged since 2006. Understandably, when it was built, it wasn't geared for Social Media. This time around though, it's was different story.

There was a whole list of changes that I'd suggested for the new website that I thought could apply to a lot of B2B websites out there that I wanted to share through this post, but before I do that, here are 2 important guidelines that I kept in mind for the entire exercise:

·   Take stock of what Social Media Properties that business has established, which it wants to leverage through its website. In my case it was Twitter & Facebook, but it can be LinkedIn or some other network as well.

·   It's critical to the website's ability to succeed in its purpose if the traffic isn't distracted from the main call-to-action. In my case, it was all about generating leads (main goal = Contact Us form) and so I didn't want to give too many opportunities for visitors to leave the site

And here are my list of elements from the obvious ones (like the Contact Us page) to the not-so-obvious ones (like About us ((it's different from Contact Us)):

·    The Home Page

 This is a good example of a place/page where it's critical to find the right balance between leveraging/promoting its Social Media Presence vis-à-vis directing visitors to its main Call-To-Action. There are 2 approaches to what can be done with this page:

• Widgets: Whether it's Facebook or Twitter - it's good to have a widget right on the homepage. In case of Facebook, the widget shows the visitor how many and also which of the user's friends 'Like' the company's FB page + the latest FB posts/updates. In case of Twitter, it'll show the total follower count + the last few tweets from that account. Both would allow the visitor to Like or Follow the company on the respective Social Networks from the website itself without going to any other page.

• Buttons: In some cases, it might not be possible to have the widgets on the home page - especially it one's aiming for the minimal look in which case it might make sense to have just buttons on the homepage which can link to (and open in a new tab) the company's Facebook page and/or Twitter profile.

We decided to go with only the buttons – and keep it clean.

·     The About Us Page

o   The About Us page would be a good place for the company to showcase all the profiles that the company has established - whether through the larger widgets or through simple buttons that lead visitors to the various Social Media properties established/maintained by the company.

o   Depending on the company, it just may make sense to have an aggregator widget here that aggregates all conversations about the company and its brands that happening online and display it real-time – although this isn’t something that I felt fit with us that well. The only company that I know of, that does this well is Zappos which is clearly not a B2B company.

o   This would also be where we decided to add a Flickr widget to display the latest pictures of the company, its employees, latest sponsorships, trips made to conferences, etc.

·     The Team Bios

o   Why only have simple bios of the team with pictures of the people? Why not link it to their LinkedIn profiles. This will allow visitors to get a more detailed idea of the company employees, get an idea of what they're upto, see any recommendations that they might have received, see the overall company profile, see if they are connected to the employees through someone and most importantly connect with the employees instantly and start a conversation.

o   Also, while I say LinkedIn, this could easily be Twitter in many cases and even Facebook for some. I would stick to LinkedIn (and maybe Twitter) though, given that this is a B2B business but that call/decision rests with the company.

o   One fair warning though, linking to employees' Social Network profiles means the company needs guidelines to ensure that employees keep their Social Network Profiles presentable (i.e. no negativity towards the company or clients, no controversial religious/political/racial/embarrassing updates, etc.)

·     The Contact Us Page

o   This is a good place to have buttons that link to the company's social media presence. This would allow visitors to contact the company through Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn as an alternative to filling in the standard Contact Us form. We felt having the bigger, richer widgets here would be too distracting and might take attention away from the main goal of the page i.e. getting visitors to fill in the Contact Us form - but again, that call/decision rests with the company. In some cases, it might even make sense to not have anything on this page except the Contact Us form to avoid any distractions from the main goal.

o   Another option, that we haven't taken up yet, but can be implemented here is to allow visitors to pull in data from their Social Networks (using maybe FB connect) to automatically fill in their contact details.

·     Customer Support Page

o   In my case, the company provides customer support and the customer support page, apart from having a ticketing system and an FAQ section definitely had scope for more social elements.

o   Apart from a Twitter widget that showed visitors the Customer Support Twitter handle (which in our case was different from the main handle), also allowed them see the last few Tweets from the handle and even easily Follow the handle on Twitter.

o   Companies using services like Get Satisfaction/UserVoice might also use this page to direct visitors to their corresponding Get Satisfaction/UserVoice pages

·     The Careers Page

o   In most cases, websites have a careers page where they list all openings (with a JD and JR) with, at worst, an email address that applicants can send CVs to, and at best, a form that they applicants can fill in and submit. But with so many companies now posting jobs on LinkedIn and using the LinkedIn Recruiter account. So it makes sense for companies to link job openings to the corresponding LinkedIn job postings where interested candidates can apply easily, share their profiles, recommendations, learn more about the company, see introductions within the company, etc.

o   This would also be where we decided to add a Flickr widget to display the latest pictures of the company, its employees, latest sponsorships, trips made to conferences, etc.

·     Case Studies, White-Papers, Testimonials & other Presentations

o   For a lot of B2B companies, Social Media is a tool to establish their company as a thought leader within the industry. A lot of this is executed by publishing blog posts, presentations, videos, white-papers covering various aspects of the industry, best practices to follow, product value propositions, etc.

o   As a basic step, it's important to allow visitors to easily share these through their Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, StumbleUpon and everything else

o   Additionally, and going very slightly beyond the scope of the website, it might also make sense to share these across portals like SlideShare, YouTube etc. so as to ensure that visitors get more presentations/white-papers/etc. by you to view once they're done with what they were viewing originally.

Overall, I feel this makes for a good starting point for taking your regular B2B website and opening it up to Social Media - allowing it to spread it contents faster and further and adding more depth to the user experience.

P.S. I realize that there is scope to add more to the list above - if you have any comments on the above or suggestions for more, feel free to let me know in the comments below. :)

P.P.S. Apologies for the verbosity. But look, I'm blogging again - Yay :)