Some social media back-to-school tips...

Just cranking up to thinking about autumn courses so I thought I'd mention a few nice bits and bobs I've found over the summer.

If you haven't come across http://unbounce.com/ and you are doing anything that needs people to signup or take a particular action, it's superb, although expensive once you have to move up from the free/low volume introductory offer.  Here's one I did for Midleton Tidy Towns - not the prettiest piece of design ever, but you can tweak to your heart's desire and try out A/B alternative pages and see which one gets more click-through, as well as download your user's information. http://unbouncepages.com/midleton-tidy-towns-needs-you/

I think facebook has lost the plot with its restrictive rules on competitions... the only way you can really stay within the rules is to do nothing whatsoever on facebook, just have a link to another website where you have the competition, or else use the Wildfire app which no longer has a free option and I think Wildfire's basic option is too expensive for small businesses and startups.  What is free and very useful is the wonderful Static HTML app for creating facebook fangates, and this is a great walkthrough of how to use it:  http://www.likethisfanpage.com/how-to-create-a-facebook-landing-page-static-html-iframe-tabs/ I particularly like that you can create several tabs for your facebook page. If you need to link to graphics host your pictures on Photobucket and link to them directly for free although the ads are annoying on the free version. I also think people should use facebook's feature for tagging people in posts (put an @ in front of their name then click on their profile when fb shows it to you)  - mention them and they get an email which by natural human curiousity they will tend to check out on your page...

I've set up a Google+ account and have winged about it a bit. I think it may end up just being for tech geeks for various reasons but do please add me to your circles if you're on there...

• Everyone's lack of time for yet another social network. 
• Although you can import your email contacts, you can't tell except by whether they have a profile picture up, who's already on G+ so you risk spamming people with unwanted invites unless you spend ages hunting through other people's circles. 
• You really must use the circles feature to keep the multiple posters out of your "stream" (newsfeed) in a separate followers circle or you will be overwhelmed by noise.
• It doesn't allow you to use Google Apps emails (my own email is on a .ie domain I've had for 15 years - I'm very attached to it, it's run via Google Apps, yet G+ forces me to use a separate gmail I have to log in to specially).
• It doesn't yet have a business offering.

So what do you discover this summer?