Social sites bombard users with information
Most social media sites throw so much information out at the users that they are bombarded; we are being asked to look at a hell of a lot of ‘stuff’ all at once and we frequently have to scroll long pages of conversations and content. Some sites manage their huge amount of information quite well, like the Guardian site for example, where the content at least looks considered. Tools are available to better manage our social media information, like Tweetdeck. Some sites do it very badly like, in my opinion, Facebook. I still can’t get over how very messy facebook is – it is ugly to look at and highly difficult to navigate, yet it is still so successful! It seems to be me to break all the basic principles of good web design, but literally millions and millions of people use it. So, that prompts the question: how good does corporate website design need to be when Facebook is so badly laid out yet still so popular?

Design is no longer limited by technical restraints
There was a time when designing a website that you always placed the logo top left of the design, because it was the only space that could guaranteed to be seen on most of the browsers; so it became a convention. Visual design had to work around a lot of technical restraints. Today we still try to design sites where the main focus is ‘above the fold’ – seen instantly on the screen of most users' computers in most browsers. But in a social media world where written and video content is so plentiful it almost always scrolls down the page, how important is this principal now? When it is technically possible to build a whole site on one page, should you? How important is key messaging and visual design now?

Emotional response to the content compensates for poor design
To me the main difference between a company’s website and a social network site like Facebook is the motivation of the audience. Spending time on Facebook has high emotional rewards; you see snapshots of people's lives who you know and are already interested in. You are highly rewarded with satisfying insights and participate because you want to be part of the tribe, that is after all a basic human instinct. You will tolerate the disorganisation and overload of superfluous information because some of the information presented means something to you (negative or positive) and the emotional gratification is high.

Emotionally driven people are more motivated to sift through lots of rubbish
Now let’s contrast the emotions of someone tasked to improve their company’s IT system with someone who is surfing Facebook: this person will have to research several sites before he finds the right company to help him and let’s face it, there is nothing like the IT system to generate a lot of emotion. But it is a different sort of emotion right? It is not ‘don’t Johnnie’s kids look cute’ or ‘I’m gonna kill him for posting that picture of me like that!’ - it's more like ‘I am going to lose my job if we don’t reduce our IT downtime’ or ‘I don’t want another day of everyone complaining the server is slow’ ... he is less likely to want to sift through piles of content on your site, isn't he?

The lack of a personal emotional attachment means they will be quick to leave
Now consider you are the company offering services that can help the IT man and you don’t have the benefit of being an internationally renowned brand. You might be a known name, but it is quite likely there will very little emotional attachment at all between you and your prospective customer at this point. So what do you do? You could produce a one page site that presents an encyclopedia of information, all of which demonstrates your expert knowledge and wisdom on the subject at hand and why your services are so brilliant etc. You could flood the page all your staff’s latest twitter feeds (most of which will be irrelevant to the subject), tag clouds, blog updates, newsfeeds and document downloads, because technically that is possible. But what good would that do? The audience is not likely to be emotively motivated to wade through this social content. They are much more likely to feel time pressured now and so a likely response is ‘Whoa – I haven’t got time for all that' and they go back to the search results and find a competitor who makes their site design simpler and the messaging clearer instead.

Don't try and mirror social site design
In summary, the social sites are successful at what they do despite poor layout design because the user is emotionally invested in the content they are being asked to skim through. A visitor to your site on the other hand is looking to gauge whether or not you can help them quickly and easily. Whilst they may be personally invested in what they are doing, it is not comparable to the emotional investment when using social media sites. We can learn a lot from social media sites about communicating with people, but we certainly don't advise emulating social media site design.

You will most likely have heard, Facebook has launched vanity URLs ( for example, facebook.com/yourcompanyname) for individuals and companies. This is an opportunity to increase your coverage online, but you must be quick or else someone will beat you to it. Even if at this moment in time you are not thinking about creating a Facebook group my advice would be to go ahead and register your vanity URL anyway. Most well known brands have made their move already, so don't delay.

What does this mean for the B2B sector? Well, although Facebook is thought of very much as a B2C social media tool, we would recommend registering your brand name anyway. Facebook is one of the most popular social media tools out there and this is something you cannot ignore. There is a lot of nice functionality in Facebook that could be utilised by a B2B company: letting people know about events, uploading video and pictures, engaging in debate etc. Don't rule it out just because it is used mainly as a social facilitator.

Update: It has since become apparent that Facebook set some prerequisites to the vanity URL for companies. Firstly they have decided you need 1000 fans or more to have a vanity URL on your fan page. Secondly, you must have had a page since 31 May 2009.

Another update: Good news for smaller companies: Facebook will lift the ban on 1000 minimum fans on June 28th.