We live in an age where social media networks have significantly matured, with key networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Google drive traffic to your businesses. We know for a fact, that by keeping our customers in the loop, we get to increase our overall revenues with them. We at the AppAddictive have seen this happen with hundreds of thousands of fan pages installing our apps, brands leveraging our custom engagement apps as well as managing social advertising campaigns geared towards optimization.

And yet, it’s still a challenge for us marketers to really get the heartbeat of our social media assets. There are way too many platforms to worry about. While we’re happy with improvements pushed by Facebook and Twitter with their respective analytics support, we feel that there’s a need for us to put all of our data in one place. This way,we have the ability to stay consistent across multiple networks and adjust our marketing campaigns if necessary.

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to keep tabs on the competition.

We are pleased to announce the newest member of our small-business suite, AppAddictive Analytics. This product is a result of countless amounts of customer-feedback based on years of making social media work for small-business.

With AppAddictive Analytics you can:

• Easily connect your Facebook, Twitter, Youtube,Instagram, Yelp, Alexa and Google Analytics accounts for data tracking.
  A powerful RSS broadcasting tool which allows you to automatically and seamlessly publish content from ANY RSS feed to multiple social media accounts at the same time.
  Have a unified dashboard where you can have top-level overview of your social media assets.
  Answer the Whos, Whys and Whens – get a deeper understanding of your fans.
  Leverage on actionable insights you can use for posting updates.
  Track competitor’s social media performance and establish an industry index to add more context to your own data. Are your competitors outspending/outmarketing you?
  Set custom alerts on competitive activity.

On top of our core analytics offering, we also provide an easy and efficient way to post and multi-broadcast your messages on Facebook and Twitter. You can schedule your posts, consolidate your library of images that you use and see post performance in real-time. You can
easily access this via the Broadcast tab.

This is just the beginning. We’ll eventually introduce new features as the social media landscape evolves.

You can immediately start using AppAddictive Analytics by clicking here. No credit card required!

Can Our Investors Download Files Securely on our WordPress-powered Site? 

With their current site built on the WordPress platform, they wanted a  way to upload monthly, quarterly and annual financial reports as well  as investor decks for fund raising. On top of that, they also wanted to make sure that some files are only viewable to certain people. To illustrate, a fund investor will have access to all files while an investor that only placed money in one business will only have access to that folder.

They examined several options before, ranging from Dropbox/Box (cheap, but has little room for customization) to full-blown Enterprise Document Management systems (expensive and too cumbersome to deploy).

The Solution: It’s All About Using Plugins Creatively

Instead of building one from scratch, you can actually implement a bonafide file management system using a cocktail of WordPress plugins. The benefits from a cost and project timeline perspective makes this whole exercise worth looking at. While it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, this approach should give you something that actually works!

For this tutorial you’ll be needing the following WordPress Plugins:

• Download Manager – This will serve as the main engine of the file management page of your site. From here you’ll create folders and manage file access permissions.
• WP Login Box – The idea here is to “hide” the WordPress interface to your end users. This plugin provides you with an embeddable login box on your downloads page.
• WPFront User Role Editor – You will need this to create custom user roles on top of standard WordPress default roles (I.e. Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor etc). We’ll need this because we have to create roles specific to your investors.

Of course this assumes that you already have an existing WordPress-powered website and have the ability to create pages without breaking your site template. This solution just requires a simple shortcode embed.

1. Prepare Your Workspace – Make sure you’ve already installed the three plugins we mentioned above. It goes without saying that you should be doing this on your test server and have performed all the necessary backups necessary to perform this exercise.
2. Create your Downloads Page – We are creating a special Downloads section on your site. You can do this by creating a vanilla WordPress page here and make sure that the page template you’re using is not meant for blog archives and other “specialized” pages. We want this to be as basic as possible. We’re essentially getting all these plugins to do the work for you.
3. Create your custom roles – This is where the WPFront User Role Editor comes into play. For this exercise, you would want to create three types, Investor Type A (all access), Investor Type B (access to project 1), Investor Type C (access to project 2). Of course, the plugin won’t really ask where you plan to use these so as a rule of thumb. Just fill-in the display name and role name (or just the required fields). Leave everything blank.
4. Create your download folders – Okay, time to fire up your Download Manager setting by clicking on the link on the left pane. Click on “Add New”.
5. Upload Your Files – You’ll probably have your own way of organizing files. In this example, we’re sorting it by company (one of many). I uploaded three files here representing monthly reports.
6. Put Finishing Touches on the Folder  – You want to make sure that these folders are only accessible to users with all the necessary permissions. You can simply configure that from the same folder interface by scrolling down to the bottom. It uses all visitors by default so remove that first then add the correct user types in the “Allow Access” box.
7. Configure and Embed the Login Shortcode. – Just add the shortcode [wplb] on the downloads page.. It’s as simple as that. Make sure you emulate the settings here! 
8. Embed your packages.  – Same as what we did for the login box. Put ALL of the package shortcodes on the page.
9. Create Your User Accounts (don’t confuse this with roles)  – We want to hide the fact that we’re using WordPress here so as a good measure, just untick the box here.
10. Change the CSS – Most of the plugins mentioned in this article allow you to put in your custom CSS. Just ask your developer to do this.

If you followed all these steps. The whole flow should look like this:

User Logs in….

User Sees Multiple Folders

…and start downloading!

So there you have it! If follow all the instructions correctly (and your files are ready) you can do all of these steps in less than an hour.

Have you considered implementing other document management solutions on WordPress? Let us know!

We tested these 2 variants. Result: The bottom landing page consistently outperformed the top one, by almost 90%. The bottom one generated almost twice as many leads as the top one.

The results are somewhat counterintuitive because we initially had a theory that the appearance of top brand logos and testimonials will generate more sign-ups. It turns out that most probably, the clutter actually got visitors distracted from actually filling the form!

Every online business should have a discipline of testing their landing pages because no matter what experts advise, there just might be something with your visitors, your product or your design that leads to results contrary to expectations.

As a developer of mobile apps, we are often asked by business owners how can they grow their apps like Tumblr?  The answer is:  Don't dream about being the next Tumblr, but instead, go for a more realistic goal, like DonorsChoose.org, which has raised over one million dollars using a seldom used feature of Facebook's API – the Open Graph, without much marketing.

I am very glad to read this post by Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org.  A business that helps organizations raise funds for good causes takes advantage of Facebook's Open Graph to raise over $1 million dollars. What is there not to like about that?

Here is how Facebook's Open Graph works:

When developers create a web or mobile Facebook app, they can specify certain actions that are automatically posted to the user's Facebook timeline. Examples of verbs are :  Run, Donate, Cook, Draw, etcetera.

When a user does certain actions inside the app, the app can publish the verbs at the timeline.

DonorsChoose.org used this clever Facebook feature to publish the verbs “donate”, “fund” at various points of the app.

Back in 2007 working only on weekends, I took advantage of Facebook's API to create quiz apps that reached 10 million monthly active users.  In these days, the Facebook apps are a lot less viral than they used to be.  But there are still tons of opportunities to use Facebook's ecosystem to grow your apps without much marketing spend.  If I were a developer starting out today, I would think about a “pain point” that needs to be solved.  I will then create a Facebook mobile app, integrate Facebook's Open Graph, and Facebook's  Native Share Dialog.

Turn your existing customers into brand advocates and gain new customers by rewarding, sharing and promoting social interaction. The AppAddictive social loyalty platform allows offline and online merchants to have a cloud based loyalty program that extends to Facebook. The first benefit to the merchants is that their loyal customers can share their activity on Facebook and bring in new customers and more business. Studies show that using social loyalty programs can save a merchant as much as 88% on new customer acquisition costs. The second benefit to the merchants is that the cloud based loyalty program saves the merchant a lot of IT costs versus desktop server loyalty program solutions. Fill out the form on the right to ask about how you can have a social loyalty platform today!

INCREASE BRAND LOYALTY

Transform customers into brand advocates by incentivizing and rewarding users on Facebook & other social networks

DECREASE ACQUISITION COSTS

Loyalty is no longer just a retention tool. Gain new customers by rewarding,sharing, and promoting social interaction

ENHANCE PROGRAM SUCCESS

Track, measure, and chart your loyalty program results on social media networks like Facebook, YouTube & Google+

MAXIMIZE ENGAGEMENT

The next generation of customer retention management is here and AppAddictive is leading the way

SAVE ON IT COSTS

Our loyalty program is cloud-based. You do not need to maintain an IT staff or servers just to have a loyalty program.

Fill out the form on the right to ask about how you can have a social loyalty platform today!

AppAddictive Social Loyalty Platform Demo on Prezi