One my clients has a new single at radio and I was researching the stations playing the single, looking for their Twitter and Facebook accounts. After looking at over 50 radio station websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts one thing become very apparent to me… radio needs help with their online world.

Here are some of my observations.

1. Radio station websites are often a busy and complicated mess. It seems that many radio websites are trying to be everything to everyone and they end up being nothing to nobody. They have content to get movie listings, news, shopping, and much, much more. Has anyone at a radio station asked their listeners, “what do you come to our website for?” I know I get my news from sites such as CNN, shopping I goto Amazon, movie listings Fandango. I don’t and have never gone to a radio website for much more than music related info such as concert listings and maybe music news. No joke, some site’s it takes two or three times scrolling through the home page to find what I am looking for, they are so busy and cluttered. If you want listeners to visit your site, make it easy for them to use your website.

Focus! Unless your station is a news station focus on what your listeners want, music. Stop trying to deliver everything. The idea of a website portal died years ago. Find your niche and focus.

2. Finding Twitter and Facebook links was not easy on many sites. Sometimes they were very small icons, very small. Sometimes they were buried deep in the site on a contact page. Sometimes I could only find Facebook and not Twitter. Make it very easy to find all your social links. Place links near the top of the site on every page. Nobody should have to hunt for how to connect with you.

3. Twitter is for conversations. Many stations used their Twitter account for nothing more than posting what song is being played. Why? Who cares? Does anybody follow a station because you want to read nothing more than a list of songs? Twitter is for two way engagement. You need to talk to your listeners. Maybe this lack of conversation explains why many stations only had a couple hundred followers. You have hundreds of thousands of listeners and only a couple hundred are following you, fail! Talk to your listeners.

4. Facebook pages need fan gates. I think only two stations had a custom Facebook tab as their default landing tab. But, the tab offered nothing for clicking LIKE. If you are going to go as far as creating the custom tab do it right and offer something for clicking LIKE. Reach out to your advertisers or artists that you are playing and ask if they can provide some content to use as a giveaway for clicking LIKE; a video, a download, a coupon. They would love to give you something. Think about this… take a live in studio recording of a artist and giveaway on your Facebook page for clicking LIKE. The artist is going to promote this offer to their fans, driving them to your page. Change the offer up every month. Use your Facebook page for more than just a place where listeners talk with each other. Talk to your listeners.

5. This might seem obvious to say, but create a Facebook page and Twitter account. Yes, there was one station that didn’t have either one, at least not that I could find by searching Twitter, Facebook and looking throughout their website. What are you doing, waiting out this social networking fad? Your listeners are talking about you, join the conversation.

Radio has always been about social networking, before Facebook and Twitter ever existed. You would engage with your listeners with contests, requests, call in talk shows, remote broadcasts. But those efforts required a lot of work to engage with a small number of listeners. Now using Facebook and Twitter you can engage with large numbers of listeners with much less effort. Your listeners are out there, spend some time with them.