Over the past 12 months, the number of UK internet users grew from 36.9 million to 38.8 million – and the majority of those users were aged 50 or over.

So if your website is set up to appeal to only the hip young things, you’re missing out on an increasingly web-savvy audience with a disposable income. Luckily, we’ve put together a quick three-point list to ensure that your site isn’t putting off potential clients.

Don’t Condescend!

If you’ve got the image in your head of a “doddery” person who can’t click a mouse, you’re approaching this with a ridiculous mindset. Your website shouldn’t be the equivalent of leaning over to your grandmother and yelling “COME ON GRAN! LET’S HAVE A NICE CUP OF TEA!”.

Don’t Overcomplicate!

That goes for any website, regardless of your audience.  Anyone new to the Internet, regardless of age, is going to be put off by overcomplicated site design. So clarify. Have a clear navigational structure, and do some user testing. If people are getting lost, they’re not spending money!

Learn From Others

According to the study, the three most popular sites with the over 50s are Saga, RealAge and Flixxy. All three are bright, clean designs. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see other similarities that you should recreate with your website.

Don’t forget to follow FirstFound on Twitter and Facebook!

If your business is going to succeed online in 2010, you’ll need to embrace Twitter for brand management, sales purposes, or to help out with your SEO.

Using Twitter for Brand Management

One of Twitter’s most useful innovations is the live search function. By using either Twitter Search or a Twitter client, you can keep up to date with what your customers and competitors are saying about you.

If you’re offering a service that requires technical advice or support, you can take a leaf from BTs book. The BT Customer Care account (@btcare) is on hand to nip complaints in the bud, and offer advise on making the most of their products and services – a prime example of reacting to feedback that springs up on social media sites.

If you want to be more proactive, Nandos (@nandos_official) have demonstrated that you can attract new customers and engage with existing customers by getting involved in conversations and offering free chicken with gleeful abandon.

Once you’ve got the hang of reacting to feedback and communicating with consumers, you can take Twitter to the next level with offers and competitions.

Using Twitter for Viral Offers

By using the Twitter community’s habit of compulsively retweeting content, you can spread your message to the masses by the clever use of offers and draws. All you have to do is give your customers an incentive to advertise your wares.

“@YourBusiness – Win a free doohickey. Just RT this message and enter into the YourBusiness.com Prize Draw!”

It’s that simple. Everyone likes free stuff, and entering is simple. All they need to do is tell all their friends about your products and services. Then all of their friends will tell a second set of people – and your advert will spread across the network.

Using Twitter for SEO

Of course, it’s not just the Twitter network you want to be found on. Search is still going to bring you traffic, so it’s important that you get listed. Thanks to Google and Bing adopting Real Time Search you can get instant listings, although listings that are brief and fleeting.

Only three tweets at a time are shown on page one of Google, and these are rotated every few seconds. However, if you use an offer like the one above and have dozens or hundreds of people retweeting your URL an hour, you can generate a fair few hits.

Twitter’s Limitations

Twitter isn’t a miracle service, and it does have limitations. The 140 character limit (aim for 110 to allow room for retweeting) is the most obvious, but the fact that Twitter moves quickly means you need to give it attention.

Twitter is at its strongest when you use it to communicate with your consumers, but it also comes into its own when it drives traffic. And if there’s one type of website that Twitter loves to drive traffic to, it’s a blog.

Check back tomorrow for Social Success in 2010 Part Two – Blogging

Social Success in 2010 – Introduction

Social Success in 2010 Part Two – Blogging

Social Success in 2010 Part Three – Taking Your Business to the Masses

 But is the decade of search coming to an end? If it is, what will replace it? And how will businesses need to adapt?

 Is Search Over?

In a word, no. Search makes information instantly accessible – it may adapt and advance, but it’s very unlikely that it will become obsolete. However, it’s almost certain that the days of search as the be all and end all of online interactions will come to an end.

Search and SEO will still be immensely important to success online, but they’ll need to share centre stage with a young pretender to the throne. Social Media.

How is Social Media Becoming More Important?

2009 saw the rise of Real Time Search. Bing was the first search engine to incorporate Twitter updates into their results pages, with Google following suit in December. As 2010 dawns, Google’s results now include Tweets, Yahoo Answers and news articles – as they are posted.

As real time search becomes more prevalent, companies will need to embrace it. And the easiest way to do that is through Twitter.

Interacting in Real Time – The Rise of Twitter

In 2006, a micro-blogging website crept onto the Internet and allowed users to share 140 character messages. Nobody paid much attention. Then, as the decade drew to a close, millions of people stood up and took notice. By March 2009, Twitter was the fastest growing website on the internet and businesses were signing up in their thousands.

Why? Because it let them interact with customers. From sales to customer services, the ability to see exactly what a target audience was talking about was too attractive an opportunity to pass up. But no man is an island, and no social networking tool stands alone either. If you’re going to use Twitter for your business, you’ll need linkable content.

Taking Content Off Your Website – The Rise of Blogging

At the start of the 2000s, all the content a company needed could be found on its website. As we move into the next decade, more and more content will be found on external blogs. Search engines love blogs, social networks love blogs, and users love blogs. Why?

Because they’re accessible. Where a company website is their corporate face, a blog is an altogether more personal experience. Tongues are looser (and sharper), information is more freely given and conversation flows in the comments sections. What’s more, you’re not just relying on the search engines to get your blogs found. Social networks seem tailor made to promote your blogs.

Social Networking or Corporate Opportunity?

Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn. These sites exist for one reason – to drive traffic towards interesting and informative pages. A stuffy corporate website won’t make waves in the social bookmarking community, but an open and entertaining blog will. And then there’s the daddy of social networking sites.

Facebook. If you’ve not heard of Facebook, congratulations on finding this blog from your cave. The chances are that you’re one of over 350 million users, so you’ll know how easy it is to communicate. And if you’ve joined the fan page of a cartoon Meerkat selling car insurance, you’ll know there’s money to be made using it.

In fact, there’s money to be made through Twitter, and through Blogging, and through Digg and YouTube and pretty much any social networking site. And from 2010 onwards, if you want to be making money online, you’ll need to embrace social media marketing.

This week, we’ll show you how.

 Where Next?

 Over the next week or so, we’ll be looking at social media in depth. Don’t forget to check back soon for the rest of the series.

Social Success in 2010 Part One – Twitter

Social Success in 2010 Part Two – Blogging

Social Success in 2010 Part Three – Taking Your Business to the Masses

But after some careful thought, I realised it actually made perfect sense. The Internet offers more choice, operates faster and more efficiently, ultimately ensuring that sales are less expensive for most businesses to make. In a recession, why wouldn’t everyone turn to the Internet to do their Christmas shopping? The added bonus is not having to depend on the British weather, nor negotiate your way though hordes of people to grab yourself a Christmas bargain!

The Second Busiest Online Trading Day … Ever!

But this is no isolated spike, either. Early data from research firm comScore suggests that yesterday was actually the second busiest online trading day in the Internet’s history. Sales are up 15% on this time last year, which was itself a new record, beating the one set in 2007. Despite my television constantly reminding me how gloomy the economic world is behind my curtain, it is clear that a vast chunk of these sales have not dried up … they have simply moved to the web.  This is a trend we can expect to see continue for some time.

We are now in December, with only 24 days until Christmas.  It is very easy to lose focus of our goal once the short-term flurry of activity has died down.  It is tempting to walk away with the message that: ‘Christmas is becoming an Internet thing’, rather than taking a step back, and seeing the bigger picture which indicates a steady migration of business to the Internet, year upon year.  As a search engine consultant who spends his life matching patterns, I can tell you that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is for life, not just for Christmas! 

Quite a number of people ask me to optimise them for seasonal phrases to ensure they are able to catch a lot of the holiday traffic. This makes perfect sense on the surface – but in reality – SEO itself responds quite slowly and is probably not the best tool for the job. The smart person will be investing in their website now, carefully manoeuvring yourself ready for Christmas 2010.

The Most Effective Way to Target Seasonal Traffic

Does your website have a blog or news section? If not, you should probably look at getting one installed. This is an increasingly popular self-promotion tactic that will allow you to post news about your seasonal promotions and offers. You will find search engines are far more responsive to blogs and news which will prove more effective at capturing your slice of the seasonal traffic. What about your websites page structure? Could you add more information pages to your site, or improve your websites page structure to allow for better quality traffic? When was the last time your website had a face lift? Trends in programming techniques on the web are constantly shifting. A few years ago it was acceptable to use table structures for the design, but this has become a tactic that is now frowned upon.

If you have an SEO consultant, then perhaps it would be worth having a chat about web development work that will help you get more out of your online presence in the long term? Rather than a sudden reaction to short term trends, this is best done in response to the gradual trend which shows the Internet is likely to play an increasingly dominant role in our shopping habits in 2010.