With today’s release of account management functionality, we’ve made it easier for our users to manage and edit their TurnSocial toolbars, without ever having to reinstall the javascript on their website. From a display perspective, we’ve also tried to minimize the intrusiveness of the toolbar on your website, by sizing it only as large as the number of apps you’ve added, and offering users the ability to hide it if they’d like (see mine on the bottom left corner of this page).
The social toolbar market is getting more crowded by the week, and although we might not yet share all the functionality of our competitors, we’ve tried to focus on supporting the apps that are most relevant to our users. The ability to bring in, and display on your website, apps like your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, Youtube Channel, and Flickr slideshow, along with neighborhood info from location based apps like Yelp, Walkscore, Outside.in, and Rentwiki offer our customers a simple solution to the problem of wanting to engage users with social media, but not wanting to send them away from their page using outbound links. With more apps, share functionality, and analytics on the way, we hope to increase the usefulness of our product even more, and continue to build value in the eyes of our customers.
There’s no doubt; we have a long way to go. Our competitors are well funded, well distributed, and offer more functionality than we currently provide; yet that’s no reason for us to scale back our drive to build something that we believe can be really useful to a wide audience. Messaging and copy can always be improved, and we need to remove some of the known barriers that are impeding the conversion process. We’re getting valuable advice from our existing customers and incorporating it into our product roadmap, and we’re always open to the constructive criticism that’s necessary to keep our eyes on the prize. I look forward to learning even more in the coming weeks, and would love to hear from you if you’re reading this, and care to share your thoughts. Drop me an email at matt@turnsocial.com, or @matthendrick on Twitter.
