The SocialToo Blog

August 30, 2010

Now You Can Check in on Twitter Through Facebook Places

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 12:02 pm

Recently Facebook launched the ability for users to checkin to any place with their mobile phone, sharing with their Facebook friends where they are and what they’re doing, but what about their Twitter friends?  Services like FourSquare and Gowalla offer the ability for users to share their checkins to Twitter as well as Facebook (or just leave them on Gowalla or Foursquare).  Facebook, with the exception of Pages, has seemed reluctant to include Twitter syncing for Facebook status updates.  That is where SocialToo comes in.  Starting today, you can now sync your Facebook checkins automatically from Facebook to Twitter using SocialToo.

The feature is completely free for anyone on Twitter and Facebook. To enable the feature, just log in to SocialToo through your Twitter account, click “Settings”, and click “Associate a Facebook Account”. Once you have both a Twitter and Facebook account linked in SocialToo, go back to the “Inbox” tab, and check the box next to “Facebook to Twitter” in the upper-right. You can now check the boxes next to the things you want to share, including, “Autopost Places” to automatically post checkins from Facebook. Once checked, any new checkin you post on Facebook will now go to Twitter.

In addition to checkins, you can also automatically post links and status updates. Any checkin with a note attached will show the note as the text of the Tweet and a link back to the checkin on Facebook. To exclude the checkin from Twitter, just add a “-” after a space at the end of your note and it won’t go to Twitter. The same goes for status updates and links that you post to Facebook.  We are also considering the potential for an opt-in “+” in the future (let us know in the comments if this is interesting to you).

Hopefully some of you find this feature useful.  We think it’s a powerful way to let others know, now on both Twitter and Facebook, where you are and what you’re doing, and has the potential to generate some interesting conversation.  Let us know how you plan to use it!

More about SocialToo:

SocialToo provides features to complement the experience people, businesses, and brands, have on the social networks they participate on. We’re a utility providing tools to help automate the process of managing a brand image, while at the same time enabling users to clean up spammy messaging, track followers and friends, and manage those friends and followers in the process. Here are some of the features we provide:

  • Auto Follow – follow back the people that follow you or your brand, providing potential discovery and networking opportunities, opening up communication channels, and giving those that follow you a sense of belonging in your community
    • Auto Follow is a one-time $10 fee.
  • Automatic DM and Stream filtering – do you get spammy DMs on Twitter? We’ll delete them automatically for you. Set up simple filters with keywords in DMs you don’t want to receive, then set rules, such as “unfollow”, “delete”, or “ignore” to get rid of them. Turn off Twitter’s DM e-mails and turn on ours, and we’ll also respect your rules with the DM e-mails we send, meaning if you say “ignore”, we won’t send you the DMs that match your rules. In addition, you can filter out people that say certain things in your stream, or that Tweet from specific (and some times spammy) applications.
    • DM filtering is free up to 4 filters. Stream and Application filtering comes with the monthly SocialToo Premium plan. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
  • Bulk Unfollow – need to start over on Twitter? Unfollow all the people you’ve ever followed at once. Set a whitelist under “Friends” and you can exclude specific people as you do so.
    • Bulk Unfollow on Twitter is a one-time $35 fee.
  • SocialToo Stats – one of our most popular features, you get a daily e-mail with all the people that followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter. We try to organize them by the Tweets we detected at the time of the unfollow or follow. We also provide additional information about each person and the ability to unfollow or follow them straight from the e-mail. In addition, for our monthly Premium users we provide an organized interface, showing a timeline of all your new follows and unfollows in a graph, your number of Tweets, and if you click through to any day it will show you the new followers and unfollowers for that day at any point we’ve tracked, along with your Tweets for that day.
    • The daily stats e-mail is a one-time $20 fee. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
  • SocialToo Surveys – a “Social” way of posting quick polls to your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Create a quick poll, and share it with your friends on multiple networks. Your friends can take the poll, share it with their friends, comment on it, or create their own!
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September 15, 2009

Tag Your Twitter Friends From Facebook With SocialToo Status

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 4:55 am

Screen shot 2009-09-15 at 3.50.49 AM

Yesterday Facebook launched their new tagging feature worldwide to their users.  The feature is simple – to tag one of your Facebook friends, you just start typing their name, prefixed by “@”, and their name appears in a drop-down that you can select.  Their name will then be linked to their Facebook profile in their status update on Facebook, and an e-mail sent to that individual to notify them they were tagged.  This also works with the Pages you are a fan of, and applications you use.  As you know though, SocialToo Status has provided friend tagging for several weeks before Facebook announced this new feature.

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Today I’m happy to announce that we’re enhancing our tagging even further.  Now, no longer do you have to type your friends’ names in the box (in fact, we’ve removed the box).  Now you just have to select the SocialToo Status green quote icon, enter your status update as you normally would, prefixing any names you want to tag with “@”, just like you would with a normal status update, and when you hit submit, those names will automatically appear next to your status update as tagged, just like they used to, but much less effort necessary on your part!

There’s more though.  Now, when you tag your friends on Facebook and enable SocialToo Status, if you check the “Twitter” box, we’ll automatically search SocialToo’s large database of Facebook users with Twitter accounts. If the users you have tagged have already registered their Twitter account with SocialToo and associated that with a Facebook account we will automatically replace the tagged name with their Twitter handle, in @reply fashion to get their attention on Twitter as well!  If the user is not yet in our database we will just put their Facebook name in its place.

Screen shot 2009-09-15 at 3.50.03 AM

If you ever had a reason to convince your Twitter friends to try SocialToo Status now’s the time!  Be sure to check out our #socialchange contest and you, or they can have the chance to win free status e-mails for life!  We’re continuing to change the Social web landscape with SocialToo – keep sending us your ideas!

You can learn how to enable SocialToo Status on your Facebook account via our earlier blog post.

August 24, 2009

SocialToo Status – Your Central Hub for Posting to Facebook and Twitter

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 10:00 am

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Facebook has long been one of the best places to connect with family and friends and update what you are doing. Now, new tools and communities have grown, such as Twitter, and you may want to update your friends on those networks as well. It has become simply too difficult to manage all this from Facebook, that is until now.  Today we’re announcing SocialToo Status.

SocialToo Status makes Facebook your central hub for posting updates to the networks you belong to. Via a simple app you install on your Facebook profile and home page, you can now use your existing status update box (or “Publisher”) in Facebook to share your updates to Twitter, any Facebook Fan Page you manage, and even your own personal wall – on a post-by-post basis.  This new tool enables you to control who sees your updates, when you want, for every single status update you publish to Facebook.

When you publish via SocialToo Status, your updates appear in your personal stream, along with a link to each destination we also sent the status update to.  This helps promote your other Facebook Pages and Twitter account, and gives others a sense of whom else you are speaking to.  The little green SocialToo quote icon with each post also helps your status updates stand out – we do no promotion of SocialToo in your updates so it looks just like a normal status update.  Our goal is to do all we can to help promote discussion for each post you publish, and at the same time give you the control in a single interface to tell where those updates end up.  We think that’s pretty powerful!

Here’s how you get started – it’s actually quite simple:

  1. Go to http://socialtoo.com and click on the “Facebook App” link in the upper-right corner – you’ll want to hit “allow” on the prompts it asks you so we can properly publish status updates to your stream.
  2. Once the app is added to your account, you’ll notice on both your home page and profile page (you can update from either location) a new green SocialToo Status quote icon in the “attachments” section.  You’ll probably have to hit the down “more” arrow to get to it. The more you use it, the more likely it will appear outside that drop down in the future!
  3. Click on the green quote icon, and a new SocialToo Status-branded Publisher will appear.  Congrats – you’re all set up!

If you have not yet associated your Twitter account, a “sign in with Twitter”  button will show up in the new SocialToo Status Publisher.  You’ll want to click on that and associate the Twitter account to publish to from Facebook.  It will only go to this account when you check the box (you’ll see this in a bit).  Also, if you want to publish to the Facebook Pages you administer, just go to the link in the new publisher box that it prompts you with, and approve each Page you want to publish to.

Now, every time you send an update to Facebook, click on the little SocialToo Status green chat icon, select Twitter and/or the Facebook Pages you want it to go to (or none of them), and it will go to each one you select.  The power of Facebook Status updates are in your hands now with SocialToo Status.  Let us know what you think!

You can see the full howto with screenshots at http://apps.facebook.com/socialtoo/status.  This is only the beginning!

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July 21, 2009

June 12, 2009

The Only Vanity URL You’ll Ever Want to Share

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 6:48 pm

facebookTonight Facebook is set to launch a new vanity URL feature enabling its users to have an easy-to-remember URL they can share with friends. We’re excited about this at SocialToo, because more than anything, it means a very high authority site will give us each the opportunity for some pretty strong SEO in the keywords we choose. We encourage everyone to go out and get a Facebook vanity URL for this purpose.

However, there is one URL we think you’ll find much more useful than that Facebook will be launching tonight.

Before you get your Facebook vanity URL we encourage everyone to come, sign up and reserve a SocialToo Vanity URL, and we’ll provide you a few extra features that Facebook won’t be providing with a simple yourusername.socialtoo.com URL that redirects to your Facebook Profile. Starting today, we’re launching SocialToo SocialStats, which starts with your SocialToo Vanity URLs that redirect to your Facebook Profile. Best of all, the features we’re launching today are 100% FREE.

Here’s how it works:

A couple days ago I shared on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook my SocialToo Vanity URL, http://jessestay.socialtoo.com, asking my friends to add me as a friend if they haven’t already (Go ahead – add me!). Guess what? I can tell you a little bit about the success of that share:

  • Over 60 of you clicked on that link in that time
  • The most popular browsers were Mozilla and Opera
  • Most of the clicks came from FriendFeed
  • Most of the clicks were in the US, followed by Taiwan, Brazil, and France

Over the past few days we’ve been tracking clicks, browser usage, referal stats, and location data for each and every individual that has clicked on your SocialToo Vanity URL which redirects to your Facebook Profile. This morning we launched a way for you to look and track this data.

SocialStats

Right now, if you log into your SocialToo account, you’ll see a new tab called “SocialStats”. Click on it. You’ll notice we’ve added a series of organizable graphs now for you to track who is visiting your Facebook Profile. We have a graph that tracks clicks. We have a graph that tracks all of the most significant browsers. We have a graph that tracks whether users are coming from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, or other sites when they click on your Vanity URL. We even have a graph that shows how many users are coming from each country. We’re working on much, much more.

The only URL you’ll ever want to share.

Previously there was no way of knowing the numbers and demographics of people clicking on your Facebook Profile. We’ve now provided a way to give you a good idea. Simply hand this URL to your friends, add it to your business cards (it’s on mine – is it on yours?), add the link to your website, and your Twitter and FriendFeed profiles. You now have a way of tracking how effective sharing those links are for you and your brand. This is the only URL you’ll ever need to share.

Are you a developer?

Contact me with your needs. We have an API and I’d like to make this information available to you! I envision a way we can allow you to share with your users how many people are clicking on these profile links they’re sharing with their friends. In addition, I’d like to enable your App to be included in our statistics – if you’d like for that to happen please contact us at contact@socialtoo.com and I’ll get you set up.  However I’d like to hear from you how you envision using this data and we’ll get you set up according to your needs at no charge whatsoever.

We’re on Facebook Too!

Just this morning, we officially launched the very beginnings of our SocialToo Facebook App. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/socialtoo and you’ll be able to change your SocialToo username and Vanity URL right in the app! Or invite your Facebook friends to create their own Vanity URLs. This is a great way to get a little Karma for sharing a very useful tool.

SocialToo Facebook App

How do I sign up?

To get one, simply register at http://socialtoo.com/registration, select your username (and a password) – this username will be the first part of your SocialToo Vanity URL. Then click on the link in the Facebook section, get the code from Facebook, and enter it in the box provided. Hit submit, and you’re done! No Twitter username or credentials necessary!  Although we provide that, too.

Generate Code

If you already have a SocialToo account and haven’t set up Facebook yet, there should be a message when you log in, prompting you to click on a link and get a code from Facebook. Do that, enter the code, and you’re set!

Much, much more to come

This is only the beginning – I foresee being able to provide you with much more information in the future. Expect broken down referer and location/IP information. Expect the ability to tell what Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed users are sharing your links. Expect the ability to also have a short URL for your Twitter profile, your LinkedIn profile, your FriendFeed profile, and many other networks, all providing detailed analytics around who is visiting those URLs. Expect to see stats right in the Facebook App itself, and much more built in that area. Expect integration with Facebook Connect on SocialToo.com very soon.  We’re also working on integration with your Facebook Page.

Now, imagine a world where you can also track “conversions” with these URLs. Imagine if, in addition to tracking the clicks and other data surrounding them, being able to see how many new friends you’ve added in that day (or lost) in result of those clicks. SocialToo is all about Analytics. We’re doing all we can to help you learn about the people following you on the Social Networks you belong to. These are all things we’re working on and hopefully you’ll see very soon.  We’re your Companion to the Social Web.

So we wish you luck in getting the Facebook Vanity URL of your choice tonight. But for now, come on over to our Registration page, get the only URL you’ll ever need at SocialToo, and feel good that the “real” URL you are giving out will actually provide you some real value.

May 5, 2009

Striving to Provide a Better SocialToo – New Rates Take Effect May 11

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 12:52 pm

It has always been my goal to keep SocialToo’s free features free, and paid features paid. I want to make things as easy as possible for you to clean up your stream and learn about your followers with as few hurdles as possible. At the same time, in some way we need to keep the SocialToo service running so we can provide you with the best and most reliable service possible. It’s really hard to do this with a 100% free service.

Last week we announced soon we would be implementing a new, one-time rate plan for our nightly stat e-mails that would enable us to provide those that pay a much more accurate stats experience and higher rate of reliability for both our nightly stats e-mails and auto-follow and unfollow functionality. You may notice when you log into your account now a new overlay shows up telling you about this, giving you the opportunity to pay for the new prioritized service.

As of today you can now pay a 1-time $20 fee which, when it goes into effect Monday, May 11, will put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account, meaning a much more accurate and reliable service for you. Previous to this, we were only able to guarantee at least once per 24 hours, and as we grew, that time frame would get even larger. With support from our users, we will now be able to expand much further and provide a much more reliable service to you.

To pay for the service, simply log into your account and a popup overlay will show up with a Paypal button you can click on to pay for the service. It’s one-time, and you’ll never pay again for the e-mails. On Monday, May 11, 2009, we’ll turn off the e-mail service for all non-paying accounts (auto-follow and unfollow will still continue) and move all payed accounts over to a dedicated server (or more depending on the number of users we have to process) responsible for prioritizing just these accounts. Those that pay now will be transferred over automatically with no interruption in service. You’ll want to do this soon so you don’t miss out on any e-mails – we cannot re-send past e-mails if you do not pay for the service.

In addition, any new users, starting today can purchase the service immediately, and on Monday will also be included in the prioritized group of users. Those new users will start getting e-mails immediately and will experience no interruption in service when the change goes into effect on Monday.

As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided. We’ll also seek to improve the free and paid versions of these services as we move forward, including more options to stop auto-DM and spam on social networks you belong to.

I hope you can respect our decision to start charging for this specific service as we grow and strive to provide you with the best service possible. It’s a decision that I think in the end will benefit those that choose to partake of it and will enable us to make it even better in the future. I pledge to continue providing you the best service and best tools possible to help you analyze and track your follower base on the Social Networks you belong to. As always, you may contact me personally via our contact@socialtoo.com address with any questions. Consider us your Companion to the Social Web.

February 28, 2009

Time to Take a Stand – Yes, We’re Ending the DMs

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 11:00 am

The Buck Stops HereI created SocialToo to solve problems. I discover things I can’t find on the Social Networks I belong to, and I create them. I then add them into our service to provide one complete companion to all your Social Network needs. On Facebook, we’re providing an easy-to-remember URL that redirects to your Facebook profile (See mine at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com). We’re also providing unique ways to poll your followers through Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed via our SocialSurveys product. These were to first solve my need to constantly have to look up my Facebook profile URL when giving it out to friends and family, and secondly, I needed a way to learn about my followers in a simple manner, initiating discussion around a particular topic that I could then track solid results around. Our nightly statistics e-mails for Twitter were also built around this premise.

For Twitter, as my followers grew, I wanted to show the gesture of at least following those people back that were showing interest in me. It was the least I could do, even if I could not pay attention to each and every one. (We’re working on that second problem)

I began by manually following those that followed me, and when my numbers were still small I would even message them, some times privately, some times publicly to thank them for their interest in me. This became a repetitive process for me, and therefore I wrote a script, and eventually an entire service which became SocialToo.com, around this.

Evidently, many others of you had the same problem, because we took off, really fast. Within just a few months, of over 13,000 of you, almost 8,000 of you are following those that follow you. At the same time, near 6,000 of you are sending DMs to the new people who follow you. Some of those sending DMs are auto-following, some are not. It is clear that people like to show some token of gratitude and maybe a little bit of information to those people that follow them.

However, it seems many people either have not understood the service, or are simply abusing it, as I believe the spammers have started to take over this system. People are complaining. Here are a few examples, with great reasons:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/social-media-is-no-place-for-robot-behavior/
http://loiclemeur.com/english/2009/02/twitter-robots-killed-me-and-why-i-apologize-i-may-not-be-following-you-anymore.html
http://www.twitterbusinessbook.com/index.php?p=754

Based on my statistics, while a small percent of you are using auto-DMs for legitimate business reasons (for instance, sending instructions to followers if you are doing an online promotion that includes following the Twitter user as part of the promotion), over one-third of you sending automated DMs have some sort of URL in your message to followers. The remaining majority is just sending simple thank you’s, which while I think are truly genuine, are now being ignored by most people that receive them. Some are even going to the extent of deleting all their followers in order to remove this burden.

We provided a way you can block these, both on messages from our site, and on messages from other sites that do this, and proudly, around 1,500 of you have taken advantage of this (500 of those are still sending out auto-dms despite not wanting them for themselves). This has reduced significantly the number of DMs many of you are receiving, both from us and those other sites that do this.

Starting today, we’re taking this one step further. As of this blog post, we are completely disabling auto-DMs to our users’ followers in order to stop this practice and bring back the usefulness of direct messaging again. This is a tough move for me, as many of you are using this service, and I think many don’t really have an issue with these DMs. However, with entrepreneurship comes leadership. As CEO of SocialToo, I’m taking a stand against automated DMs, and hoping other sites that do this will do the same. With what used to be a useful tool, came too much abuse, and someone needs to put an end to it. Until we can come up with a better solution we’re going to put an end to it.

In addition, starting today, while you will no longer have need for blocking SocialToo users’ automated DMs, we encourage you to invite all your friends to come check the same option you were using to block SocialToo DMs, and we’ll block other sites that do automated-dms. If you provide your Twitter username and password (this is required because other services require it – it will be via OAuth in the near future) and check the box, “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?“, we’ll set you up to block DMs from as many services that do this as we can, automatically.

This is a big move for us, and my hope is that it will cascade and encourage others doing the same to also remove this option. My other hope is that Twitter will also put in limits to discourage this practice (add it to the Terms of Use?). If you would like to show your support, please feel free to donate via the link at the top of SocialToo.com, sign up and check out our many other services, or contribute new ideas for the service on our GetSatisfaction page – perhaps there’s a way around this we’re not thinking of. Here is a list of all the services we still offer (available in more detail on our About page):

  • Auto-Follow those who follow you
  • Easy-to-remember Facebook profile redirect URL
  • Unfollow filters – specify when to unfollow someone who has been following you
  • Twitter Blacklisting – we’ll do something really cool with this shortly
  • SocialSurveys – poll your followers on the social networks you belong to
  • Nightly Stats E-mails – tell who followed you and stopped following you in a day (our most popular feature!)
  • Many more to come shortly!

In the meantime, please feel free to discuss this in the comments. I’m still listening, and if your for, or against this, I want your feedback – do you have any ideas on how we can re-enable this in a way that doesn’t offend others? Would it be better we re-enable this in the future, requiring users to pay for it? What other ideas do you have, and is this the right move? I want your suggestions!

(Photo Courtesy Marshall Astor)

February 1, 2009

Track the Popularity of Superbowl Ads with #superbowlads and SocialToo SocialSurveys

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 1:52 am

Today, with the help of Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, Chris Heur, Louis Gray, and Guy Kawasaki, we’re unveiling a new way of making the polling experience even more social by expanding on a project Jeremiah Owyang put together last year.  The idea is simple – discuss and rate your favorite Superbowl ads using the hashtag, #superbowlads, and then come vote on SocialToo on which one was your favorite.  If you don’t have a Twitter account you can sign up here.

We’ve added in a new feature, just for this event, which will collect all the comments surrounding the event under the hashtag, #superbowlads on Twitter, and display them underneath the survey.  If you have a SocialToo account (register here if you don’t), you and your friends can also comment, right under the survey to leave your thoughts and opinions, and it will be sent out, with a link back to the survey, out to your Twitter friends.

You can play with it now, and tomorrow, starting 6pm EST when the Superbowl starts, you can make your vote (although we suggest you wait for it to end!).  We’ll be taking your vote, along with comments you leave, and publishing the results when it’s over.  We’ll publish it here, but you can also reference the results on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog any or via the survey page itself.

This is a new era of making Survey and Poll taking a little more “social”, by enabling you to chat and discuss with others as you vote.  Oh, and stay tuned – there much more to come!

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