By Nick Johnson - February 28th, 2013
We’ve just launched our new website. It’s designed to help you get the insight and analysis you need to do your job better. Read on to find out more about our new tools and features!
Over the last six months, we have been working hard to redesign our homepage.
The aim has been to make it easier for you to get to the analysis and insight that you need to do your job.
We thought you would appreciate a quick tour of the new features that the site now offers.
New navigation system to deep-dive into the areas that matter to you
We've spent a lot of time working on the site navigation. There are a couple of things to highlight here:
A new navigation bar splits our content into themes.
- Marketing: Insight on marketing best practice, news and developments
- Customer Insight: Looking at both customer service and response, along with how to use social media to get a fuller picture of your customer
- Reputation: How companies are using social media for brand management, reputation preservation and crisis communications
- Measurement: Tracking impact and ROI of various aspects of social media strategy
- Embed Social: Looking at how companies are moving towards becoming a 'social business' by embedding social media across multiple departments and corporate functions
Get to the most useful analysis first
We highlight our 'featured' articles in our new 'Headline Carousel', so you'll never miss the best and most insightful articles.
See the latest articles as soon as they're available
Equally, we hope you'll be checking in on the site daily, so we've also highlighted our latest articles on the right. That way, you can see exactly what has changed since your last visit, and get all the newest news and analysis as soon as it's ready.
Get the news that's causing a buzz
Once you dive into a specific are of social media, you'll see a new box on the right hand side, highlighting the most popular articles within that area. At the moment, this is just based on views that month, but we'll be integrating social media mentions and buzz shortly.
Deep-dive into topics that matter to you
Not only can you now view our articles by area, but we have started to highlight related articles we published previously. This way, you can do further reading around whatever issue you're looking into, and ensure you get all the insight we have available on the topics that matter to you and your job.
And find targetted content on specific issues
The whole site is now searchable, so you can find insight on any topic we've ever investigated on the site. Just use our new scrolling search and navigation bar.
A big push to discuss
We've had Disqus commenting available on our articles for a while now, and they're back on the new site. This way, you can keep your Disqus profile from social interactions around the web, and use it when getting involved in the USM conversation.
Highlighting the most current opinions
We know that social media is all about conversation, so we've gone further with the new redesign. Wherever you are on our site, you'll be able to see the conversation that's happening with our new 'recent comments' box.
Here, not only will the most up-to-date insight and commentary from our community get shared, but you'll be able to jump right to the article where the best discussion is taking place.
Make your own voice heard
You don't need to stick to the USM site, either.
With our new sharing functionality from ShareThis, you can post articles and comments to whatever social profile you like. As soon as you see an article you think might be of interest to your community...you know the drill.
If you want to engage with us over social media, you'll see all our social profiles collected at the top of the page in our new scrolling navigation.
Get a more tailored, relevant and useful experience from USM
We're trying to practice what we preach, and get more information from our community to ensure you only get the most relevant data, analysis and information from us.
Our weekly e-brief is one of our most popular products. It shares not only the best analysis from UsefulSocialMedia.com, but the best and most insightful commentary from around the web. But we know it can improve, and we want to make it more relevant to you.
Right now, we're asking you to let us know what areas of social media you care about by using our new newsletter signup form. Once we've got enough insight from the community, we'll only send you news about the topics you've said you want to hear about.
Of course, if your priorities change, you just need to fill in the newsletter signup box again, and we'll add your new focus areas.
Never miss a chance to learn even more from your peers
Our conferences and reports have great feedback from our community, and we want to ensure you can find out about every event and intelligence report that will benefit you.
All our upcoming conferences are highlighted on the right hand side of the page, and once you jump into a specific area of corporate social media, we'll show you the conferences and reports relating to that area on the right.
If you want to sign up to be kept updated on specific events or reports we have upcoming, then you can also do that from our new scrolling navigation bar.
A new tool for you to leverage the full power of social media for your business
Social media has completely changed how companies do business.
Our aim at Useful Social Media is to help you navigate a rapidly changing environment, and make the best business decisions - based on insight and experience from your peers - the practitioners working on these issues at some of the biggest and most forward-looking companies in the world.
Our new site is another way we're trying to do that. We hope you like it. We'd love your feedback. You can use the comments on this article to share your views, grab us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, or email our founder directly on nick.johnson@usefulsocialmedia.com.