Introducing Support for RSS Feeds, Twitter Follow, and Improved Sharing

Over the last few weeks we’ve been rapidly making updates to the TurnSocial bar, so I thought I’d take a quick moment to bring everyone up to date with what we’ve been up to.

RSS

First and foremost, we’ve had lots of requests for us to introduce support for RSS feeds on the TurnSocial bar – so I’m happy to announce that we pushed an update over the past weekend that does just that! TurnSocial customers can now easily add any RSS feed they’d like to a toolbar directly through their admin screen – just one more way to deliver useful content to visitors on every page of your website. Don’t want to use RSS content from your blog? No problem – why not get creative and share your Quora “Answers” feed? We look forward to seeing the myriad of ways our customers use the RSS feature to interact with visitors on their websites, and we’re very happy to finally offer support for this long-desired feature.

Twitter Follow

It’s always been great that visitors to your site can see what you’ve been up to on Twitter, but now with our built in Twitter follow button they can also follow you with just one click! No need to enable this feature – just check your TurnSocial bar, and you’ll see that the update is already live!

Share

Another new tweak to the TurnSocial bar you may notice is an enhanced “Share” button, with a clear call to action next to the “Share” icon. We heard you loud and clear when you told us that you thought many people couldn’t immediately identify the “+” sign as an area of the page to share from, so we’ve taken this as the first of multiple steps to increase sharing engagement. Have more suggestions for how we can improve the toolbar UI? Feel free to shoot me a message at matt at TurnSocial.com and let me know – I’m always up for hearing new ideas.

Between support for RSS, built-in Twitter follow capabilities, a few minor UI tweaks, and our announcement of support for Satisfacts Resident Ratings, the last few weeks have been quite exciting for us at TurnSocial. We have some very cool things we’re working on behind the scenes right now, and I can’t wait to share them with you over the coming months – so why don’t you pop up that little Twitter icon on the TurnSocial bar below and follow us to stay up to date with what we have in store?

Thanks again for all of your continued support – here’s to a great second half of 2011!

Get SatisFacts Resident Ratings On Your Community Website

We’re happy to introduce an exciting new feature for our partners in the multifamily industry – the ability for apartment companies to add SatisFacts Resident Ratings directly to their community website with the TurnSocial bar. A community’s website is an excellent source of inbound leads, and it’s our job to do everything we can to increase your rate of visitor conversion even more. The addition of SatisFacts as a supported app means you now have an additional tool in your arsenal to deliver engaging content for your visitors to connect with.

SatisFacts Resident Ratings

One of our goals at TurnSocial is to expand a community’s ability to market itself beyond simply showing/telling prospects about the property. The TurnSocial bar provides the context of the community’s presence on popular social networks, as well as local information about the surrounding neighborhood. How walkable is the neighborhood? What do current residents have to say about the area? What popular restaurants are nearby? TurnSocial enables access to social media profiles and location-aware content from WalkScore, Rentwiki, Yelp, and more directly onto apartment community websites to help prospective renters learn the answers to these types of questions. And now, with the addition of ratings from SatisFacts annual surveys and Insite™, its 365-day/year feedback program, we’re helping to improve a community’s online reputation and marketing appeal even more.

SatisFacts is the multifamily industry’s leading resident satisfaction survey, retention and performance improvement service provider. Adding resident ratings from SatisFacts provides prospective renters with valuable information from their peers about an apartment community, while creating a powerful way for apartment marketers to enhance online lead generation. Every SatisFacts rating is displayed on a scale of 1-5 stars, and since it’s built into the TurnSocial bar, will appear unobtrusively on every page of your website. Who better than current residents to tell new prospects how great your community is to live in?

When you only have a few critical seconds to make a favorable impression on new visitors to your website, every opportunity to highlight your strong points is meaningful. If you’re not currently a SatisFacts customer and would like to get resident ratings for your community, email me at matt at turnsocial.com and I’ll connect you with the right people – they’ve got plans starting as low as $1/per unit per year!

Take a look at the example rating we’ve added to the bar on the bottom of this page, and let us know what you think in the comments!

Twitter Follow Button Now Live!

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.

VaultWare adds support for 3rd party apps; features TurnSocial.

VaultWare, a provider of apartment marketing and leasing solutions, recently announced support for 3rd party apps within their premium website offering, specifically mentioning TurnSocial as an example of how customers can make their website more interactive. We’re honored to be mentioned as the featured app!

VaultWare’s support for services like TurnSocial illustrates the increasing desire of multifamily companies to incorporate social and location-based media into their websites, and further establishes TurnSocial as the go-to product for accomplishing this somewhat complicated task with ease. We’re proud to add VaultWare to our list of partners focused on building value in the multifamily housing industry, and look forward to a great year ahead as we continue to roll out innovative features targeted directly at property management professionals.

To learn more about Vaultware, visit their website by clicking here. If you’re a business owner or agency interested in working with us on a custom solution for your customers, please reach out to me directly to discuss the opportunity at .