Polish Up Your Tweets with Buffer

January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Good Morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

I started last year to use Buffer, it’s a cool widget that lets you tweet when you visit a web page.  You might think yeah yeah, you can do that with lots of other apps, and indeed you can – Marginize is one that I looked at recently and love, but I love this more :)

What is so fantastic about Buffer is that….

  1. It’s free – you know how I love free
  2. It can be used with Twitter or Facebook (but only personal Facebook accounts on the free version)
  3. You can schedule content with it – by this I mean that rather than me surfing about and sending tweet after tweet of cool pages I’ve found in the space of an hour and then nothing much for the next 23 hours I can space it out….
  4. There are analytics on the tweets you send
Filed Under: Applications, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

Google Apps Uncovered

November 16, 2011 By 1 Comment

Good morning, Social Rabbit here with a special guest blogger – Nikki White talking about Google apps.

Once your small business starts to grow and you find yourself with multiple team members who perhaps work remotely you’ll start to find that the systems you previously used in your business just aren’t enough. That relying on standard emails to transfer documents and information becomes too cumbersome and time consuming for your business to run efficiently.

That’s when small business owners look for a server or intranet solution to assist. One of the solutions available on the market today is Google Apps. I have taken the liberty of condensing the vast amount of information available on Google Apps into one article to assist you in making a decision if Google Apps is the way to move forward in your business.

Google apps for business

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Applications, Guest Bloggers Tagged With: , ,

Did you know you can “checkin” to websites?

December 15, 2010 By 3 Comments

Good afternoon, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today I found a new toy!  It’s an application called Marginize.  This application basically allows you to “checkin” at a website, similar to how you do in person with Facebook Places and FourSquare.

To use Marginize you just go to their website and download the application into your web browser, then every site you visit will have an orange Marginize tab on the right of the screen.

The image on the left here is me using it on this website, I can:

  • Check in to basically say I’ve been here, and similar to FourSquare you can earn badges for checking in.  Plus the most active member becomes curator of the site.
  • See who else has checked in on the site
  • See the site’s community – that is who has checked in, and comments that they have made
  • See what people are saying about the site in social media
  • Post a comment about the site/page on the site on Twitter, Facebook or Google Buzz  and the comment includes a link back to the site you are commenting on

I have to say that I am a convert (after the whole 5 minutes I have been using it!), because no longer do I need to use Tweetdeck, Facebook or Twitter to share links with people, I can do it from within the website as it were, which saves me time :)

I like that you can see who else has commented on the sites and what they have said, and with your own site there may be comments that you weren’t aware of, as I find that alerts don’t pick up everything.

You can also add a Marginize plugin onto your website so that people can see the feed of what others have said.  However I don’t think it is worth doing this unless you have a number of comments on the site and people having checked in, as it will look a bit lame if it is just you!

Marginize is a very new site, which started in November, so far it only has 309 people who hold the “hello world badge” which you get for your first reaction, ie the first time you post a comment using Marginize to your Twitter, Facebook or Google Buzz account.  In total these 309 people have made 2085 check ins to websites, so nearly 7 per person.

I think that this will take off, and funding for it so far is $650k in seed funding, TechCrunch has written an article on it, saying that the fact that people have to download an app to their browser is a big barrier to entry, and that this will either succeed on a massive scale or fail….  I am going to stick my neck out here and say that I think it will succeed, lets see what the next 12 months bring this company.

Have you tried this site?  Do you think you would you use it?

Filed Under: Applications, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why do people think social media = free?

May 6, 2010 By 1 Comment

Good Morning, Social rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Today this Rabbit is ranting…  As you may know I am involved with a fantastic Facebook Shopping Cart app called Vendor, yesterday we posted a survey asking about what improvements people would like to see and how much they would be willing to pay for improvements.  The idea is that there will always be a free version, but we will later on introduce a paid version with more features.  This sparked off a number of comments from users about how it shouldn’t cost anything and that it was bad enough that PayPal took commission.  This is a common theme running throughout social networking sites that people expect EVERYTHING to be FREE!

My question to those people is how do the people who make the applications and keep them bug free live?  On fresh air?  It frustrates me beyond belief that people are so self-absorbed that they don’t think about others, they think that time is free.  I am sure that you all know or have met these kinds of people, and I have blogged about this before.

I know that the reason people expect app’s etc to be free is that because that is how they have started, you know how when you first got TV the channels were free (still is, unless you live in the UK), and then cable came in, now with cable you get more features and benefits but it costs money, but people pay because they can see the value in it. 

Much of the attitude around wanting app’s for free is that people just do not understand how much time and effort has gone into building it, if they did would they value it more?  I think the answer is yes, a lot of the time we assume that if an expert is doing it it takes them 5 seconds…. well as one expert to another I can tell you this is not always the case.  Or prehaps they don’t think.  If at the bottom of everything that was provided for free people put: FYI This took me x hours, would it make a difference?

I know that we are not talking about everyone here, but just maybe some people should stop to think “how are they making money doing this?”  rather than “how can I get everything I need to make money for free”.  We all love getting freebees, but I think when free becomes paid, we have to learn not to moan, and to say “thanks for giving it to me free for so long!”

Well I think that is enough ranting for today, tomorrow you will be treated to a Facebook Page review.  If you have any issues that really bug you tell me in the comments, so I don’t feel alone :(   Plus if you would like to donate to the “keeping this rabbit in carrots fund” please email me….. I’m joking :)

Filed Under: Applications, Small business, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,