The Ocean Agency

So this week, our Chicago SEO company made a big change. Really, it’s not that big, but it has made a big difference in how we think about writing for SEO and for communities.

Until this week, our department had been using Yahoo! Messenger, which incorporates a lot of features that we didn’t really need (stock ticker, news, Y! Voice) and was invasive to our PCs and workflow.  Our manager Timothy suggested the switch to Yammer, which our department promptly adopted. And… pardon the creative spelling here… we loooooooove it.

For those unfamiliar with Yammer, it functions similarly to Twitter: you update your own status, and it is shared in a feed. But you must have a company email address to join, and only people from your company are included in your network and can see your updates. Your company’s feed is private. Yammer also has a desktop application, so you can keep it open in a window and view your coworkers’ updates. For us as a company, this is incredibly useful for two major reasons:

1. Ease and immediacy of communication and sharing
2. Specificity of networks within that group communication

Ease of Use in Yammer

The communal nature and immediate communication of Yammer is essential for our company, where teamwork is important to our quality of work. For instance, in my Yammer feed, I can share a link to an informative article to everyone in the company at once, instead of emailing it out or messaging it to multiple coworkers. Or, if I need help thinking of a topic for some content, I can ask everyone for their ideas by updating my status.

In fact, I just did:

Useful, eh?

The interactions are instant and open, enhancing our abilities to work as a team and bettering our work overall.

Specificity of Networks in Yammer

Meanwhile, you can also share your updates with only specific groups that you create. If I have a great idea for my fellow content developers, I can update my status and share that update just with our group. Your Yammer feed quickly fills with information that is relevant and helpful to you, and you don’t find yourself sorting through noise.

So, what lessons can we take from this as content developers?

If you look at your website’s content as a communication tool for a group (which it is), you can apply what we learned from Yammer and use it to create better content.

Ease of Use In Online Content

Yammer gave us instantaneous and easy communication with a select group. Well, the people reading your website’s content are already a self-selecting group — so how are you making communication with them easy? Here’s how you should be doing it:
1. Write organized and optimized content. Understand how people read on the web, and write your content so it will actually be read by the people you are sharing it with. If your content isn’t presented properly, you’re likely to lose some readers.
2. Share things with your group/audience that are relevant and necessary. On Yammer, no one wants to read updates on what you ate for breakfast or how you are feeling. Therefore, you share content in your updates that is useful for your team. Likewise, you shouldn’t flood your website or blog with content that isn’t useful for your readers. A blog post filled with marketing messages will alienate readers who are on your site looking for content that is useful to them.
3. Require user action. To gather information on Yammer, you sometimes have to pose questions to your coworkers. Fostering interaction with your users through the content on your website is a great way to make that content useful for you and them. Don’t be afraid of asking questions in your content to communicate with your group of readers. Invite your readers to participate instead of lurk; use calls-to-action.

Specificity of Networks in Online Content

On Yammer, you know who your audience is and who you are directing certain communications to. You are, at the same time, a part of that group yourself. Writing content on your website for specific groups, but also as a part of that group, makes that content more effective. You should:
1. Write for specific groups. Obviously, your content should be of interest to your customers or people who might visit your website looking for information. But don’t be afraid to write to specific groups within that larger audience. Make it easy for them recognize who the content is relevant for in the title of the post or page — you don’t want your users to read two paragraphs of something they aren’t interested in and then bounce.
2. Write as a part of the group. Web users are becoming incredibly wary of marketing or sales copy. When you are writing for your customers, write as a part of that group — not as a marketer writing to an audience or a business owner writing to customers. Whatever the interest is that unites your group, identify it and participate in it. Create content that you would find useful as a part of that group, and your users will find that content valuable, too.

In the workplace, finding a communication tool that enhances your company’s efficiency and teamwork is incredibly helpful. In our case, that tool was Yammer. In content development, treating your content as a communication tool, and trying to make it the best tool it can be, helps you create the quality content for your users. Apply our Yammer-based lessons and start creating content that brings readers to your site and keeps them coming back.