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.

But what about the inside pages? As a content developer or business owner working on a site, do you still consider every word carefully? Do you monitor the consistency of tone and message closely? As views of a page decrease, does your attention to its content, too? It shouldn’t.

A complete website will have finely-tuned content on every page. Here’s why: SEO companies know that usable, optimized content drives an SEO campaign and that users, like Google, recognize quality content.

Embrace good content on your inside pages!

Great Content Enhances Loyalty

Quality content throughout your site’s inside pages builds customer and visitor loyalty. The people who venture to your inside pages are also the people who will come back to your site again and again for the information it provides. Upon seeing valuable information in perfectly executed copy, customers and visitors alike will return to your site.

As a web writer, you can present your client as an authority by providing polished and informative content. Authority builds the trust of users and encourages them to convert into customers. Through authority and trust, you can continue to bring customers back to the site again and again.

Repeat customers will:
- Use your site each time they need your good or service.
- Spread the word about your company by recommending you to their friends and social communities.
- Cite your content as expert info on their own blog and in their social communities, promoting your site further.

Users of the site, even if they aren’t paying for anything yet, will return if there is a freshly updated stream of well-presented content.

Repeat users will:
- Cite your content as expert info on their own blog and in their social communities, building your authority within your industry.
- Be likely to use your company over your competition when they DO decide to make a purchase.
- Recommend you to those who are searching for your services.

If your inside copy isn’t informative, readable and organized, great homepage copy can fail to convert your visitors into customers or keep those customers coming back for more.

Content With SEO Techniques Brings in New Users

Good content isn’t just well written, informative, and perfectly organized. It’s well-optimized for the search engines, too. Using SEO techniques in your titles, subtitles and organization makes the content more usable for your current readers and helps you draw in new users from the search engines. Since these SEO techniques benefit the user and further your business goals, you can and should apply them carefully to each inside page.

Copyblogger offers great tips of how to create cornerstone content that search engines love and how to use SEO techniques that readers love. Lure those readers in from the search engines and keep them coming back with your quality content — that should be the goal of web writers for their sites. While your homepage copy catches a user’s eye and conveys your principle message, your careful attention to the content on the FAQ or About page could ultimately be what converts that user.

Well-optimized content brings new users in from the search engines. Informative content brings people back. Perfect content converts users to paying customers. Why would you pay less attention to inside copy when it has the power to do all that?