Creately Blog

Post your Diagrams on Twitter

First we brought you URL shortening for your published diagrams, and now we’ve introduced a 1-Click button that makes it easy to share your published diagrams and designs on Twitter.

We Love Twitter

We love Twitter, and we know you do too. So the next time you create a beautiful Mockup you want to share with your other designers, or are working on an open-source project and want to share your UML and DB designs with the community, Twitter provides a great way to reach out instantly to like minded people.

Easy to Use

Visual Collaboration is more than just the diagrams your draw. Here at Creately,we make the whole process of visual collaboration and sharing easy. You’ll find our new Twitter button neatly tucked away in the right-hand Share panel. Simply, select the check box to enable a public short-URL for your diagram and click the “Share on Twitter” button to publish your diagram directly to Twitter.

And if Twitter is not quite your cup of tea, remember you can always invite your friends and co-workers to share and collaborate on your diagrams securely within Creately.

Give it a try, and watch this space… we’re only days away from a spanking new release that we hope will answer some of the feature requests we’ve been getting on our User Support Community. Check it out for a sneak preview of what’s coming your way this week.

Thanks for all the great feedback and for helping us get one step closer to public.

@creately

URL Shortening for Creately Diagrams

History

URL shortening has been around for ages. For example tinyurl.com has been around since 2002, which while not that long is ages on Internet. With the recent popularity of Twitter and its artificial limit of 140 characters for the tweets has really moved URL shortening from a specialty to a mainstream activity with a very useful purpose.

Traditionally URL shortening services have generated a random and unique code which is placed after their own short domain name to create the short URL. Recently they have started to allow users to add their own unique code although this is a little used feature because of the need to maintain a short URL. Take a look at bit.ly to see this in action.

Advantages & Disadvantages

URL shortening has its distinct advantages and disadvantages. For the Internet user, URL shortening provides a mechanism to easily include short yet useful links in a message without using up all the available characters. For the website provider URL shortening can remove or even damage their beautifully laid SEO plans. It removes the easily readable and meaningful URLs that make search better and help users understand what they are going to be viewing.

So we have two forces here pulling in different directions. Well this got me thinking about what we should be providing at Creately to really enable our users to publish their diagrams for the public to view in a manner that makes sense and allows the most flexibility.

Our Solution

It should be stated at this point that basic URL shortening is not technically difficult, a point proven by the explosion of URL shortening services that have sprung up. You can do basic URL shortening - which is  really URL redirection using the HTTP header -  in about 10 lines of code in PHP (I’m sure it can be done in less if your really smart :-))

After much internal discussion we’ve decided to keep our new short URL service short and sweet with a new short domain

See are some sample URLs we’ve published from Creately:

http://create.ly/fub9l2671

http://create.ly/fuk35unh1

Our URL shortening has been achieved with a mixture of Apache configuration changes and PHP code to enable the URL shortening. The flexibility and function that this provides to our users is huge. Any Creately user can now simply copy and paste this link into their email, IM, or Twitter post to share their diagram or design with the world at large.

In the future we have plans to allow Creately users to specify their own custom URL for published diagrams. This means that each diagram can have an SEO friendly link and it lets the links to be more descriptive.

If you have any ideas for improvements to our published diagram service please head over to our Community Support Site or email support@creately.com

@nick_foster

Startup Strategies for Marketing on Twitter

Just went thru 10 Steps to Terrific Twittering - basically a boiled down version of all of @guykawasaki’s tips for Power twittering. As a young startup, we already practice many of these tips, but there were some that I had not truly appreciated the value of, until reading this post.

1) Follow your Followers

This is one of Guy’s commandments for Twitter. At Creately I wasn’t sure it that’s the way it should work for us. I had envisaged the @creately account to be used as a way to keep our beta users and interested parties up to date with new product features and updates. I wanted to let people find us online and follow us on Twitter, if they saw what they liked at creately.com. I very quickly found this approach works well with people who’ve heard about Creately and found us online, but did not allow us to reach out to the millions of technology early adopters who live in the TwitterSphere - which is really what Guy believes it can do for your brand. I felt I had made an implicit social contract with my @creately followers not to bombard them with the slew of twits or twitter activity that it takes to build a Follower base. But I needed to do more on Twitter.
It became clear that Creately needed more than one account to manage our conversations and marketing efforts on Twitter (more on our Twitter experience here) which leads nicely to my next point.

Tip - We use SocialToo and TweetLater to keep track of our followers, unfollowers and set-up auto-follows.

2) Use the right tools

There’s a lot you can do these days with the vast number of services and tools that have sprouted around the Twitter API. For us, managing multiple accounts and keeping track of user interest in our market (read ‘keywords’) was an important issue. I tried a slew of tools - TwitterFox, TweetDeck, Twirl, Destroy Twitter and services - Twitter Search (love the RSS), Twitscoop, TweetSuite, Splitweet, Social Mention (just to name a few)- gaining experience along the way and moving to more sophisticated tools as required. Start experimenting small to understand what Twitter can offer then decide what you want your Twitter presence to deliver and select the right tools based on your strategy.

Check this great list of all Twitter apps and tools on the Twitter Fan page on pbwiki.

3) Squeeze the Trigger

As Guy puts its - and I concur, how long do we want to wait before we decide its acceptable to direct market on Twitter. I think its time - as long as its done in a personable way and is not spam. Even if you think its Ok to engage with potential customers in this way, how do you go about doing it? Should I engage with Twitters who are discussing diagrams and mockups? Should I monitor conversations on competitors and try to reel new users in? These are issues of business ethics that will finally reflect on your company’s values and need serious consideration.
Personally I would take a cautious approach to direct marketing and definitely not use the @creately account for fear of alienating my current followers. Perhaps @diagramHelper would be a good moniker.

4) Make it easy to share.

This is a very important enabler if you want to see results on Twitter- remember the power that is inherent in the crowd. I won’t discuss this much here for fear of letting too much slip out - but watch this space.

Let me know what works for your startup. Back to Twitter!

@charanjit