Zeald.com have just released a new Social Media Addon for Zeald websites. Chief Techie, Jono Sim lists the features and benefits of this new Addon here:
Social Media Addon
To sum up our social networking tool: it is a tool for promoting your website and products by broadcasting via RSS, Blogs, & Social Networks (in the same way as email marketing is a tool for promoting things by broadcasting via email). Thus we have four products for promoting your website: PPC, SEO, Social Networking and Blogs, and Email marketing, and clients should be at least thinking about which of these they might use.
Our social networking tool offers four things that you cannot get anywhere else (for any amount of money):
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NZ-based Phone Support from an NZ Company: Any "free" offering out there comes with essentially no support. It's made by some faceless San Francisco Bay area startup dreaming of being the next Facebook. Even the paid offerings that do have support don't offer anyone in NZ to help, and seldom if ever to the level we offer. This is a major issue for most clients.
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Our blogs integrate into your website. No other blog tool can do this properly (even with all the hacks like frames and subdomains, etc). At best you might match the design and put it on a subdomain (to my knowledge, no client has ever managed to even get this right) but your blog posts could never come up in searches, integrate into the navigation, appear in your sitemap, etc.
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Unmatchable ease of use: our blogs and social tools integrate into the backend. To blog/tweet/facebook something, you click on a single button and it automatically fills out everything for you. Most other social networking tools are designed for "power users" and even if they aren't, you still need to do a lot of cutting and pasting and general mucking around.
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It addresses the question of social networking upfront in our order form. Regardless of whether people purchase it, the fact is that we are "experts" in it, offer a packaged solution for it, and don't just "ignore it and hope it goes away like the other guys do."
There are free options for "do it yourself" Social Media updating, just as there are for email marketing, PPC and SEO. If people choose to use these, they are welcome and they all work perfectly well with our website solution (accepting the limitations outlined above and, of course, no support). We even go so far as to offer things like the social widgets in our free package to help them develop a Social Media presence.
We have been encouraging people to use free tools like blogger now for years, and pretty much no-one has. In fact, people were willing to pay for a customisation in order to get fully integrated blogs over using a free tool. Many clients have not got the time or inclination to use the multiple different free or cheap "cloud" solutions and would prefer to just buy something that does it all.
