I’ve gotta admit, we were a bit disappointed earlier this week when Twitter announced that they were enabling enhanced API access to website publishers, making the process of adding in-page follow buttons a breeze – but only because David had just finished up building that same functionality into our product – without Twitter’s help!
One of the most common pieces of feedback we’ve received from customers is that they would like us to enable the ability for visitors to their page to follow them directly from the Twitter app. Unfortunately, until recently there were some very technical reasons that made that nearly impossible – even well funded companies (with plenty of developers) in the toolbar space like Meebo and Wibiya hadn’t figured out a way to implement in-page follow. Fortunately for us, our technical co-founder David is a code wizard who can figure out just about anything when he puts his mind to it, and last week he finished a workaround that allowed us to include a “follow” button on every Twitter app we’ve enabled.
And then Twitter released this API update! Grrrrrrrr……
Oh well. We’ll get over it. What matters is most is that whether using our current system, or the Twitter update which we’ll soon implement, this is a big win for our customers. Earlier this week, you might have noticed a follow button living inside your Twitter app – with 2 quick clicks, visitors to your page can follow you without ever leaving the page they’re on. Now there’s even one less reason for them to ever “bounce” to interact with your social content. (If you don’t see the follow button on your screen, try giving the page a hard refresh (control+shift+refresh) and it should show up – if not, please let me know!)
What’s next? Well aside from cleaning up the UI a little bit, if you take a look at our UserVoice page, LinkedIn seems pretty high up on the list of requests. Maybe we can try to fit that in…..
Get your TurnSocial bar HERE.