Published September 28, 2011

In the desktop software world, the one thing that strikes the most fear in the hearts of developers of great applications is (cue the dramatic music) -- DROP-OFF! Drop-off happens for a variety of reasons but causes the same end result: your software is never used. Worse, in our research, up to 40% of downloaded software is never even installed! Ouch!

So let's explore some common issues that contribute to higher drop-off, or put another way: Why aren't people successfully installing my software?

The Download Process (It certainly is a process…)

I won't detail the importance of making sure your download is easily accessible from your site and syndicated to safe, popular download sites. You've done all that, so where and why are they dropping off? The fact is that many users, even today, are totally confused about what to do after downloading a file. Yes, shocking… but true.

Part of the solution is to help people understand how to initiate your installer by providing browser and (even better) OS-specific download landing pages with information about what to do next. Take Dropbox as a great example of how to do it right.

Install Initiated

Next comes the crucial point of guiding the user through your installation process while providing appropriate disclosure(s)—such as your End User License Agreement—and any other screens that add value to their experience.

The "classic" 'Welcome Screen' that says "Hey, this is ACME Software! You ready to install? Okay then, CLICK NEXT!" is unnecessary. Instead, for example, you can combine the welcome screen with your EULA. Provide users options to make informed choices, but don't overburden them with 20 installation screens. "Default" or "quick" installation options help less-tech savvy users to easily and successfully install your software, while providing an "Advanced" option allows app-addicts total control. The bottom line is: Eliminate unnecessary screens. If that's not possible, consolidate screens -- without overwhelming people.

NOTE: If you include or recommend third-party software in your installer, you must provide the ability to easily opt-out of such offers on an install screen. While OpenCandy's Network Policies are requirements for working with us, they're also a great blueprint that any developer can use to ensure a safe & positive user experience.

Prerequisite What?

If your software requires prerequisite software, make it easy for users to install programs they don't have. At the most basic level, ensure your installer detects whether necessary prerequisites are already installed! Be aware that the more prerequisites you need to install during your software's installation, the higher the chance of a problem occurring and the lower the likelihood of a successful installation.

First Launch aka SHOWTIME!

Your software is now installed and the user has launched it for the first time. What do you do? Provide users with information about how to use the MOST important feature(s) so they can quickly get value from using your software.

A few ways to engage users at first-launch:

• Launch a guide on your website
• Walk through with screenshots
• Display a video
• Guide them to the help file

TechSmith does a great job with Snagit of handling first-launch by asking if you're a new user. If you click yes, it loads their website and a screencast to quickly get you up to speed:

Show people how to use your software to solve the problem they have. At the very least, tell them where to get help.

Turning Users Into Evangelists

The ease of discovering, downloading, initiating an install, successfully completing the install, and getting someone to launch your software, are all part of what I call the "Software Courting Ritual". It can turn someone merely interested in your software into a passionate, engaged user that EVANGELIZES it! Make your *total* user experience delightful and the success should follow.

That's it for now. Good luck! Let us know in the comments what has worked to lower your drop-off and have fun creating happy users!

PS: Here are some great articles about user experience in relation to marketing:

• Marketing IS User Experience by Hillel on Jackson Fish Market blog
• Top 10 Tools to Measure User Experience by Giovanni Calabro on Pragmatic Marketing
• What marketing executives should know about user experience by Nick Myers on The Cooper Journal (Don't let the title scare you off as it almost did me ;) -- you don't need to be a "marketing exec" to read or appreciate the post.)

Dr. Apps -- Follow me on Twitter!
Software Community Guru for SweetLabs

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Material Disclosure: Neither Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs received compensation for the creation or posting of this content from any third-party services or software mentioned within.

The post Marketing & User Experience Mistakes Software Developers Commonly Make appeared first on OpenCandy.

Recently my colleague Alastair and I posted "19 Twitter Tips for Software Developers" and concluded by saying we'd follow up with a post highlighting some awesome Twitter tools. Which brings us to the following list of apps, tools, and services I've found invaluable for anyone aiming to get the most out of Twitter.

These tools enhance your Twitter experience by filling in the gaps within Twitter's current native offerings, namely: better historical search, user analytics, sentiment analysis, tweet scheduling and more. Most of the tools are free, but some offer a free version with limited capabilities and an affordable "pro" or "premium" version with enhanced features. Enjoy!

TweetDeck

First a preface… If you plan to, or are already heavily using Twitter, you are better off using a standalone app instead of Twitter's native web GUI. Thankfully, there are tons of third-party Twitter clients available for pretty much every platform and device on the planet.

One of the most popular clients, and the one I've been using for the last few years, is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free and powerful multi-platform Twitter client. It provides a multi-paned interface that easily lets you add columns which display information you choose, such as your followers' tweets, @mentions, DMs, Twitter searches (the modern day "equivalent" of Twitter Track, RIP) and more.

TweetDeck also supports multiple accounts (as well other services like Facebook). There are way too many features and services tied into Tweetdeck to mention here, but I wanted to scratch the surface. TweetDeck was once a third-party app, but the company was snatched up by Twitter in May.

FriendOrFollow

FriendOrFollow is a free, easy-to-use web service which enables you to input your Twitter handle (…or someone else's) and get back a list of people whom: you're following but aren't following you back ("Following"), "Fans"-- people who follow you that you don't follow back (yet), and "Friends" -- people you follow whom also follow you. FriendOrFollow also allows you to export the "Following", "Fans", or "Friends" lists to a CSV file.

DoesFollow

DoesFollow is a dead-simple, free service that shows you if Twitter user ‘A' follows user ‘B' and vice versa. DoesFollow recently added the ability to show you whether a Twitter list you specify contains a specific Twitter user. Check out Damon Clinkscales (@damon), the creator of DoesFollow on Twitter.

Social Mention

Social Mention offers one of the most comprehensive real-time social media search and analytics services I've seen – for free! It scans over 75 – mostly -- social services for the keywords (or Twitter username) you search for and gives you an at-a-glance look at the "strength", "sentiment" ratio, "passion" and "reach" of the query.

The real-time search results page Social Mention provides also features a more detailed breakdown of sentiment (positive, negative, neutral), top keywords, top users, top hashtags (e.g. #software) and sources (e.g. StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) related to your search.

You can also setup Social Mention to send email alerts or subscribe to an RSS feed for your searches, as well as export the results to a CSV file. All that and they also have an API, as well as an easy way to embed a "query" widget on your website.

Snap Bird

Snap Bird is a free Twitter search service that goes beyond what's currently provided by Twitter's native search (RIP Summize!). Simply input a Twitter handle, sprinkle in some keywords and let Snap Bird do the magic of finding the (public) tweet you know exists but can't seem to re-discover. If you want to connect Snap Bird to your Twitter account you can also run searches to find old DMs and a few other neat tricks.

TweetEffect

TweetEffect is a rather unique tool in the Twitter universe because it aims to provide insight into the effect specific tweets have on your "followership." Simply enter your Twitter handle and it scans your tweets to (loosely) determine whether certain tweets caused people to follow or unfollow you. I think some people might construe TweetEffect as a novelty service; but I believe real value of TweetEffect is the data it provides that could help you better shape the type of content that resonates with your "audience". Don't sleep on TweetEffect.

Buffer

Buffer is a nifty new tool/service in the market that allows you to create and schedule tweets to help you space out the timing of tweets so you don't inundate (and possibly turn off) your followers or even possibly discourage new people from following you. Buffer also serves up randomly generated tweets (mostly motivational in nature) that you can choose to add to your "buffer". Buffer offers specified times during the day to send your tweets or you can customize the times manually. At Buffer's current rate of user growth, I expect to see a lot more from them in the future. (That, or Twitter buys them... Or bakes in a scheduling service they create).

Buffer tip: For software developers, consider using Buffer for announcing new software releases -- using different messaging, and posted in between other tweets so you don't bombard your followers with the same "themed" tweets -- to maximize the possible number of people who will see your tweet, which hopefully translates into more people visiting your site and downloading your software! Remember, not everyone is in the same time zone. ;)

That's it for now! There are so many tools, apps and services I couldn't squeeze in here, so please share what you use in the comments!

Dr. Apps -- SweetLabs

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Material Disclosure: Tweeki is made by SweetLabs. Neither Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs received compensation for the creation or posting of this content from any third-party services or software mentioned within.

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As a desktop app or web developer, there’s always that “one” time you need a “second set of eyes” to help you quickly fix a piece of code that’s causing you headaches, or those times when you simply need to collaborate with someone. This is exactly why every developer needs at least one great code sharing or “paste” site in their arsenal. These services allow you to easily upload text (code) to a website for public (or private) viewing. Sometimes called “code sharing” or “code snippet” services, they are most commonly known as “pastebins.”

Any ole “pastebin” service has standard features like syntax highlighting and archiving, so I honed in on some that support advanced functionality like code compilation, debugging and more. Here are four of the best “code sharing” services that should be on every developer’s short-list and added to your toolkit.

1 - Ideone

Ideone (which is Italian for “great ideas”), would like to be known as an “online midi IDE and debugging tool” instead of a paste service. Sounds like a legitimate request since Ideone boasts the ability to compile, run and debug code from over 40 programming languages! They also have an API which has been used to create mobile apps as well as some really nifty things like “Run This!” which lets you run snippets from your blog. Ideone doesn’t support password-protected pastes that can be shared (you can make a paste that only you can see though) or diffs, but depending on your situation those may be minor quibbles when you consider how useful their offering is.

2 - Gist

If you’re familiar with GitHub, the web-based hosting service for developers using the Git version control system, than you may know Gist. Gist is Github’s code paste/sharing service which is tightly integrated with the GitHub platform. Gist leverages GitHub’s architecture such that all gists are automatically git repositories. This means you get versioning and the ability to fork built right in! Thus, every gist is also reusable as a git repository (little recursion there). In addition, Gist also supports private gists, diffs and SSL.

3 - Codepad

Codepad, like Ideone is unique in that it’s not just a pasting service – it’s also an online compiler/interpreter. Currently Codepad supports 13 languages, private pastes (not password protected, private just means a noindex tag is used to prevent indexing by search engines) and you can choose whether you want to execute the pasted code or not. There’s also a Codepad Vim plugin and Emacs integration available. Check out their about page for some cool details about the service.

4 - Pastebin

The "original" pastebin service established in 2002, Pastebin now boasts of more than 8 million active pastes (they say 1/3 of all pastes are private). Pastebin supports syntax highlighting for more languages than any other pasting service I’ve seen. Pastebin has desktop apps for Windows and Mac, as well as browser extensions and mobile device apps (iOS, WebOS and Android) as well as an API so you can build your own app or service. Be sure to check out the “Trending Pastes”, you never know what type of interesting things you’ll find there (admittedly most are non-code related).

Missed a mention for a pastebin service you love? Let us know in the comments which one we left out and why you love it!

Happy pasting, sharing and collaborating!

Dr. Apps -- Follow me on Twitter!
Software Community Guru for SweetLabs

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Material Disclosure: None. Neither Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs has received compensation from the makers of any software mentioned for the creation or posting of this content.

Image source: Geek and Poke -- The Real Coder, http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2011/02/the-real-coder.html

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About this series

This article is part of a series of articles about software marketing for developers. Follow this easy-to-understand guide to improve the visibility of your website, increase distribution of your software and grow your user base.

In this series:

• Part 1 - Make your site convert
• Part 2 - Distribute your download
• Part 3 - On-page SEO for Software Developers (this page)

Introduction to SEO

Search engine results are clearly a key factor in driving software distribution. As most developers can attest, a huge percentage of website visits are driven directly from search results; which means if you want to improve distribution, you need to optimize your site for great search engine rankings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your web site’s visibility in search engines so it shows up closer to the top of organic (non-paid/non-ad) search results when someone queries keywords related to your site or software. Search engines constantly test and tweak the "signals", or the data they use to rank the relevancy of sites and pages, which is what makes SEO as much art as dynamic science.

The closer to the top of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) your software shows up, the higher the chance of someone clicking through to your site. A recent study by Optify, conducted in December 2010 using data from organic keyword searches, found that on average the #1 search result receives 36.4% of clicks, followed by 12.5%, 9.5% and 7.9% for the second, third and forth positions.

Search results are determined by the relevancy of a web-page in relation to the search query and the "authority" the site or page has. Authority equals trust, and while little is known about how exactly search engines calculate authority -- the number and quality (authoritativeness) of backlinks to your site is definitely a key factor.

SEO is a combination of "on-page" and "off-page" factors. In this guide we’re focusing on SEO techniques to employ on your site (i.e. on-page SEO). Effective on-page SEO will help you with your off-page SEO, which we’ll cover in another article about building links back to your site.

What follows is an overview of some of the best ways to maximize your site’s on-page SEO.

Keywords

Know your keywords. Google provides a great keyword tool to show how much traffic is generated by different keywords that relate to your software/site. Based on this information, you can determine the relative importance of various keywords related to your software. You can also use this information to structure your site and content (e.g. URLs, title tags, H1s, bolded text, etc) for better search engines rankings.

When starting a new site, it’s easier to rank higher by targeting keywords that are less competitive, i.e. keywords that aren’t in great demand by other sites. Perhaps more importantly, when choosing keywords think about the words that someone would use to search for a solution to the problem your software solves, instead of keywords that are all related to the features and functionality that your software has. If you want to get an idea of what keywords are driving the most traffic for your competitors check out Alexa.

Content

Your goal is to write easy to understand content that includes your target keywords. This isn’t about trying to stuff as many keywords you can on a page – it’s about writing copy that naturally includes your targeted keywords. A general rule of thumb is to use your targeted keywords 2-3 times for a short page and 5-7 times on a longer page. Check out this SEOMoz article about perfecting on-page keyword targeting.

Search engines and users love sites that deliver fresh content, so think about starting a blog to help bring in new and repeat visitors. Most importantly, never "lock" important content in file formats that search engines have trouble crawling (Flash, even AJAX can be a problem -- Google offers guidance on ensuring AJAX is crawlable, etc).

Remember, content isn’t king; original, relevant, high-quality content is king.

Site architecture

Your site architecture determines how easy it is for search engines to crawl and users to find your content. The "flatter" the site architecture, the better. Meaning, the fewer levels it takes to get to content, the better off you’ll be. Your goal should be to make all of your content accessible within three clicks. Your most important content, including your software download, should be one click away. Check out this post which includes a video about site architecture.

Site speed

Although site speed is currently a very,very small factor in your site’s rankings, ensuring your site is as fast as possible creates a better user experience. It also speeds the time it takes for search engines to effectively crawl your site and for users to load pages. KISSMetrics published an infographic which illustrates how slow site speed increases the rate of users abandoning a site/page. They found that "40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load" and that "A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions."

A couple of ways to increase your site’s speed (and save on bandwidth) include: keeping image files as small as possible without losing quality, minimizing the number and size of Javascript libraries your site uses (Google offers hosted libraries you can use), tighter "or" cleaner HTML and CSS code (try a CSS minimizer), and using Gzip to compress pages (works on Linux and Windows web servers). Google has a page dedicated to tools and services designed to help make the web faster. Yahoo offers a great tool for measuring site speed called YSlow which works in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It tests webpages and assigns grades (A-F) to different factors that influence speed so you can figure out what changes to make to increase performance.

Page title tag

The title tag tells search engines and site visitors what a page is about and is one of the most important factors for on-page SEO. Use your chosen keywords here, with the most important keywords as the first words of the page title. The page title is also what users see on a SERP, although most engines limit what they show to around 65 characters along with a short description of the page (see Meta Descriptions). While not absolutely necessary, you can include the name of your site or company in the page title; just make sure it’s appended to the END of the URL.

• Example:
  You make a free application to help users backup their Windows system. Note this is a highly competitive category of software with many established products.
• Best:
  Windows Backup Cloning Software Free | ABCSoftware
• Good:
  Windows Backup Software Free | ABCSoftware – Makers of Great Windows Software
• Bad:
  ABCSoftware – Makers of Great Windows Software – Free Windows Back Software

If you’re aiming to get people to download your Windows’ backup software, put the right keywords first!

Headline Tag (H1) and other header tags

The headline tag (H1) is used for the main headline of a page and usually matches the page’s title tag, but it doesn’t have to. The header tag doesn’t carry as much weight for rankings as previously thought, but it’s still important to use so people can easily see the main topic of the page. Make sure you only use one <H1> tag per page as Google has been known to penalize pages that use multiple h1s. Other header tags (H2, etc) help you semantically structure your content, but won’t do anything to increase rankings.

      Example: You have a piece of software for downloading photos from Flickr.
      You decide to target the keywords: "download photos" "flickr".

• Good:
  <h1>Download Flickr Photos Quickly & Easily</h1>
• Good:
  <h1>Download Flickr Photos Quickly & Easily</h1>
• Not-so-good:
  <h1>Learn How You Can Quickly & Easily Download Photos from Flickr</h1>

URL structure

URLs are incredibly important in determining how a page ranks. Ideally, you should structure your URLs so that the most important keywords are at the beginning of the URL, and keep all URLs as short as possible. Shorter URLs are easy for people to understand at a glance, and make it much easier for them to share. Always use hyphens instead of underscores since hyphens are "guaranteed" to be treated as spaces (which are bad), whereas underscores are not. Never use spaces in URLs, they will be converted to % and having % in a URL isn’t very friendly. It’s also generally advisable to strip file extensions from the end of your URLs, but is not an SEO necessity.

• Good SEO-friendly URL:
  http://mysoftware.com/windows-disk-cloning-free-software
• Not-so-good URLs for SEO:
  http://mysoftware.com/viewpage.php?p=2526982
  http://mysoftware.com/software/downloads/Mysoftware-Super-Disk-Cloner
  http://mysoftware.com/software/downloads/mysoftware_super_disk_cloner.aspx

Images and alt text

Using appropriate file names and alt text for images is an often overlooked way to optimize your site and has the potential to drive more traffic from image-based searches. The key is to make sure the file names of your images and the alt text include your target keywords. The title tag (which is shown when hovering over an image) is another place to use your relevant, targeted keywords. SEOMoz recently published a great write-up on the importance of optimizing your images for SEO.

• Good:
  http://mysoftware.com/windows-disk-backup-cloning-free-software.jpg
• Not-so good:
  http://mysoftware.com/softwarelogo.jpg
• Idea:
  Release your images under a Creative Commons license. Say a software blogger is searching for an image for a post about Windows backup software. By naming your image with your targeted keywords, the blogger may discover your software and if it’s good, he or she may include you in their article.

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions don’t carry any weight as far as rankings go, but they serve an important function – they can help drive increased click-throughs to your site. On a SERP, you’re presented with a page title as well as a snippet of what the page is about – this is *usually* the meta description. A well-written, original and catchy meta description -- no longer than 150-160 characters (the maximum length shown for a search result) -- which contains your relevant and targeted keywords along with a strong call to action (see example below) can make the difference between someone clicking on your site or someone else’s – as long as the search engine chooses to use the meta description, which is not always the case. Sometimes, copy in the body of the content is used; sometimes it’s a combination of body copy and the meta description.

• Good:
  Get our free Windows backup software now and prevent data loss. Quickly and easily clone your hard drive. Download today -- save headaches tomorrow
• Bad:
  Myfreesoft offers Windows programs that help you maintain your Windows system. We offer free software you can download today.

Meta keywords

Stuffing keywords into the meta keywords field was a common tactic back in the AltaVista days. Those days are long gone and so is "keyword stuffing" as an "SEO technique". Some argue that you should still use meta keywords, while others strongly argue against it. The decision is yours, but if you do use meta keywords, make sure they correspond to the actual content on the page you’re using them on.

• Good:
  <meta name="keywords" content="backup, windows, clone, hard drive, free, download">
• Bad (drastic example but you get the idea):
  <meta name="keywords" content="backup, windows, clone, hard drive, free, download, coffee, hotels, airlines, cars, celebrities">

Dynamic sitemap

A sitemap (usually an XML file in the root directory of your site called sitemap.xml) lists all the pages on your site you want crawled and includes information such as the date the page was last modified. If you’ve followed the guidance provided thus far, search engines should be able to easily crawl and index your site -- with no additional work on your part. However, using an automatically generated sitemap is easy to implement in most content management systems and ensures that content which is not directly linked to from within your site will still be crawled and indexed.

Note: To exclude certain pages or directories for being crawled, you use a file called robots.txt. Learn more about using the robots.txt file to exclude specific files or directories from being crawled. Be aware that there are "aggressive" spiders that ignore robots.txt, which means you’ll need to employ real security measures and access restrictions if you really need to keep certain files from being crawled.

Learning more about SEO

If you follow the above guidance, it will help you boost your search engine rankings and hopefully drive additional traffic to your site. Although making your site content, architecture and URLs SEO-friendly is extremely important; by itself, it is not enough for you to rank highly for competitive terms. In order to do that, you need a large amount of quality (authoritative) inbound links to your site. We’ll cover "off-page" SEO tips for building links to your site (backlinks) in another article. Luckily for software developers, it’s a bit easier to get some authorative backlinks by distributing your software through download sites or portals.

For more resources to help you familiarize yourself with the basics of SEO, Google has a great starter guide that covers some of the key things you need to understand about search engine optimization. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, also publishes great, short and extremely timely videos on YouTube about SEO (and other topics) which help dispel myths and will get you going on the right path.

In the meantime, there are a slew of great resources online for learning about SEO (besides the vast amount that Google offers). Here’s a short list of some great, trustworthy ones to help you get started and up your SEO knowledge.

• SEOMoz (they also have a huge list of SEO resources)
• Google Web Master Central
• Search Engine Land
• Search Engine Watch
• SEO Book
• Alltop SEO – aggregator of the top SEO resources
• Marketing Pilgrim
• YouTube Google Web Master Central Channel
• W3Schools

Until next time, definitely download a full-sized PDF or image of Search Engine Land’s recently released "Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors for an outstanding infographic representing what (currently) matters when it comes to SEO (both on and off-page).

Thanks for reading!

-The OpenCandy Team

The post Software Marketing Best Practices
Part 3: On-Page SEO for Software Developers appeared first on OpenCandy.

The first rule of Twitter is that there are no rules. There are, however, some guidelines and best practices that you can use to get the most out of using Twitter to help promote your software and connect with your users.

That’s the key thing to remember: connections. Although essentially a "broadcast" platform, success on Twitter (like any form of social media) relies on meaningful engagement with others. If you use Twitter like a megaphone, you’ll miss the opportunity to create worthwhile relationships with your end-users. Here are 19 tips to help you get your "tweet on" successfully.

DO:

• Add a "follow us" button on your website to make it easy for people to follow you; Twitter has a button generator here.
• Keep an eye out for people who have recently followed you and follow back selectively. (Twitter sends email notifications of new followers by default.)
• Retweet followers who post interesting questions or testimonials about your product’s new features. Retweet relevant/interesting things even if it has nothing to do with your software.
• Reward your followers with access to beta programs.
• Remind users about special promotions.
• Leave enough room in your tweets so it’s easy for others to retweet you. Good rule of thumb: Max length of tweet = number of characters in your username + six characters (one character for @ and five for "RT: ") subtracted from 140 (max characters in a tweet). Best case is to leave as much room as possible.
• Pick as short a username as possible (hopefully it's memorable too). Going along with the tip above, long usernames will make it more difficult to say what you want *and* be easily retweetable.
• Use relevant hashtags (e.g. #freeware when tweeting about your free software) where appropriate to make your content more visible to others.
• Follow select leaders in your area of the software/technology space.
• Use a URL shortener like bitly to save characters and track clicks (bitly also supports using a custom "short" domain that you own instead of bitly).
• Use lists to "follow" people without having their tweets show up in your timeline. You can create public or private lists for a variety of reasons; for example you could use a public list to add end-users who love your software.
• Let people know when new versions of your software are released.
• Inform people where they can go for support-related questions by leaving a note and link in your Twitter bio (i.e. For support -> link).

DON’T:

• Establish Twitter as a customer service platform. Your followers don't want their feed inundated with your support answers. See the last tip above in "Do" or create a separate Twitter account for support only.
• Promise new releases and then miss the date. You'll establish a trail of negative tweets from disappointed end-users.
• Use the Twitter account for your products for posting personal tweets. You may alienate or upset your followers. Note, this doesn't mean not to be *personable*. ;)
• Air grievances on Twitter.
• Announce new features too far in advance. People have limited attention spans and will get tired of waiting for them. Their expectations may become higher than you can deliver.
• Let third-party Twitter apps/services spam your feed with things like "I have 542 followers". Whenever you authorize an app to access your Twitter account, double-check the details.

That wraps it up for now. There are tons of third-party tools and services to help you do just about anything (get analytics, find people to follow, etc) with your Twitter account. We’ll cover some of our favorites in another post. For now, take a look at oneforty which has a great directory of third-party Twitter apps/tools along with descriptions and user-submitted ratings.

Tweet well and let us know *your* favorite Twitter tips in the comments.

By:
Alastair and Dr. Apps

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Material Disclosure: None. Neither Alastair, Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs has received compensation from the makers of any software/services mentioned for the creation or posting of this content.

The post 19 Twitter Tips for Software Developers appeared first on OpenCandy.

Skype

Dropbox

Join.me

MindMeister

Google+

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Material Disclosure: None. Neither Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs has received compensation from the makers of any software mentioned for the creation or posting of this content.

The post 5 Apps that Make Collaborating & Working at Home More Productive appeared first on OpenCandy.