I love Facebook.

There I said it. The reason I was having dilemma stating it openly was that till all this while I considered it as one more yuppie social networking site that will die a quick natural death. But I was wrong. And that only makes me happy. Having turned an entrepreneur, I have realized the kind of benefits I have reaped from its features.

So this post is to those features that each of you can use to promote your brand. Use them wisely and you will experience success whichever category your brand may be operating in. Here goes:

This is the second section of the research that we have carried out on social media with respect to India. Do read the first section.

Part 2 – To map out the current usage pattern of social media of Indians

Q5) How much time do you spend everyday on blogs, social networking and uploading photos and videos?

© Windchimes Communications Pvt Ltd

It is really surprising to note that more than 1/3rd of the respondents spend more than 30 minutes everyday on social media sites.

Windchimes wishes its readers a very exciting and adventurous 2009

There is absolute dearth of statistics on social media with respect to India or Indians. It is important to understand the prevalence of social media in our lives. There are studies indicating that close to 40 mn Indians are online. But really nothing beyond that!!

So what are these people doing online? How important is social media to them? How do they consumer social media? How is social media impacting the purchase behavior? How can marketers leverage social media platforms to reach out to their potential consumers. We carried out research to find out answers to these questions to help us understand and give an insight from an Indian context.

The research data that we are presenting is representative of 3 Indian cities; Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. While we have received responses from people from other cities but they weren’t statistically significant. The responses have been collated as whole and not individually of 3 cities.

This is the concluding post of the series on essentials of a website. Do read the first, second and third segments of it.

We continue with our learnings:

1. Analytics for your website

Analytics is HTML code that you enter in your website scripts that records the number of visitors on your site. Along with that it gives out other data points like amount of time they spent on the site, which pages did they visit, the bounce rate, how many of them were unique visitors etc.

There are expensive tracking tools available that you could use or do with free ones like google analytics. This is completely dependent on your need. We felt that google analytics did the job pretty well.

This third blog post on the essentials of a website continues to share with you our learnings of developing our website. Do read the first and second post

1.    Website Designers

We are assuming here that while you will provide the content, you will ultimately hire a designer to put all that up for you. Do a profile check before getting any designer on board. Luckily in this case the work of the designer would be up already as part of somebody else’s website. Understand who will be working on your site. You could also share the sitemap with them and tell them that you are looking at them to pitch for your website. This works best if you are corporate client.

Before signing, understand and record the terms and conditions. Ensure that you have written down all that is part of the package as you will surprised how your costs have escalated from where you had started. It would be a good idea to surf several your work related sites. That will give you idea on what different features are available as part of HTML language. You could also give out reference screen shots for specific features that you have liked.