posted17/04/10
Businesses both large and small are fighting to get involved in social media, the craze is spreading like wildfire. But just how much do you know about it? Social media is a new phenomenon known by many names - geeks call it web 2.0, marketers call it social marketing, and yet others may call it social communication. Social media is a broad term, the best way to understand it is by narrowing it down. Hopefully this post will help businesses to understand the concept of social media and the best social media sites for your business. Delicious, Digg, Facebook and Wikipedia are just some examples, but today there are literally hundreds of other social media sites that your business can leverage to improve your website traffic. Today we’ll share some of the services we’ve come to rely on and see how each one of these have helped us increase traffic and engagement with with our customers.
Social News Sites
Social News Sites are great for finding useful resources, articles, and information on the web. We submit our blog posts and any other news relating to Creately to many news sites. Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit and Propeller are a few of the best news sites which bring in the highest number of visitors. These sites offer the ability to actively participate in the discussion by leaving comments on popular news items. Once you submit links, you can vote up people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that you don’t like. Interacting and connecting with people with similar interests cannot be any easier!
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Bookmarking sites allow users to save their favorite sites with tags/keywords to manage and organize them easily for later use. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are always the highest referring sites at creately.com. We save our blog posts, landing pages and other relevant articles. Bookmarking sites not only allow you to save and share your favorite websites, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Thanks to Charan, I’ve gained immensely through Charan’s Del.icio.us bookmarks. Just type in any web or marketing keyword and I bet you’ll find loads of interesting and useful resources! 
Social Networking Site
Social Networking sites have become increasingly popular these days. Twitter is a great networking platform we engage in for interacting with our customer, well-wishers and prospective users. Tweetdeck is a Twitter application that helps us organize, update and handle all your tweets and followers. The best part of this is the ease of managing conversations which interests you. Hootsuite is another web-based Twitter application we love. It’s best feature is the ability to schedule tweets for later delivery and it lets your whole team manage your Twitter presence. You can now sit back and relax while all your tweets are sent out at the scheduled times. Twitter has undoubtedly helped us gain users and so has Facebook. We continuously post our articles on our Creately’s Facebook profile – we have 200 fans currently and it’s still growing. We love it when our articles are re-posted, liked and commented by our fans from all over the world.
Photo and Video Sharing
Social Photo, Video and Multimedia Sharing Sites are great tools for sharing photos, videos and presentations. At Creately we don’t do a lot of photo sharing, but all our screencasts, demo videos and tutorial videos are broadcast via YouTube and numerous other video sharing services. YouTube has been a great medium to help us reach out to users to demonstrate Creately’s ease of use and great diagramming capabilities. In fact, we’re working on a new video for our homepage at the moment - so watch this space! We also make presentations and upload them on Slideshare. Our users have always liked our attempt in presenting our landing page contents in simple slides. We’re hoping to do at least one slidehsare presentation a month. Fingers crossed!
Wikis
Wikis are sites which allow people to freely create and edit any number of hyper linked web pages. These help people know about the Creately as online diagramming software, its use, benefits and features. Besides Wikipedia, there are a host of other niche wikis that may be useful to your business like - WikiHow, WikiSpaces & WikiAnswers. Social media plays a vital role in the marketing of Creately.com. These sites have contributed well in building traffic and will help any marketer promote his/her business. I’ve put together a quick diagram illustrating the 20 best social news sites that we engage in - so save it somewhere close and get working on your social media strategy!
@induja
posted08/02/10
As Twitter becomes more popular and pervasive, it has become an essential tool for start-ups to engage with their customers. Here at Creately, we actively engage our users, supporters and even the occasional detractor on Twitter.
Recently, we wanted to understand what our customers say to us on Twitter so @Indu went through our Twitter archives and put together this simple connections map of our @Creately Twitter account to capture some of our more active users and what they’re been talking to us about.
Who’s Talking to Creately & What are they Saying.
As @Indu worked on the diagram, she decided to pull together some recent Tweets about Creately to share with the team and you - our customers.
- b3nw: saved by a javascript app creately - http://creately.com after MS Visio just refused to link things, whew. Best $5 i’ve spent in along time.
- UrbanHaiku: learning how to use creately.com to make a flowchart for my blog. I like it.
- JasonStoddard: Highly recommend @creately & checking out their mindmapping/diagram solution. Hosted. Elegant. Stupid-simple. #FF
- megormi: I made some interesting graphic organizers today using creately.com thanks to the suggestion by@socratech
- nocash: Been looking for something like this for a while: Create and Collaborate on Online Diagrams - Creately -http://creately.com/
- Rohlund: I highly recommend checking out creately.com if Microsoft Visio is not your friend. #ittools
Thank you for all your tweets. We try to respond to each and everyone of them - so if you’ve enjoyed using Creately - tell us - we’re always listening on Twitter.
If you’re not following Creately on Twitter - now’s the time.
posted16/01/10
Setting up your own web product company? Start following the founders of Creately on Twitter to see a mix of interesting and insightful tweets!! And, yeah one such tweet is what made me contribute today! I found an really useful blog post on Mashable - ‘10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs‘. This was tweeted by Creately’s co-founder Charan. This post grabbed my attention cos I wasn’t aware of some of the tools listed here.
To help me remember, I thought it would be worth it all into a diagram that would capture the essence of each of these services visually. I created this diagram on Creately. With Creately’s slick Upload Image feature, I managed to pull through all the icons of the Social Media Tools in the list, added a short description and it was ready to be published.
So here’s a simple chart to help you remember 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs and Startups!
If you enjoyed this - remember to check out how easily you can create visual maps like this with Creately - Online Diagramming.
@induja
posted08/06/09
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
posted26/03/09
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
