We've all heard a lot about the importance of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
If you're like me, you're probably a little sceptical about the usefulness of all this stuff, but I guess a hundred million users can't be all wrong ;-)
The good news is the NeatClubs.COM now provides facilities to help you determine whether it is useful or not via a very nice add-in available from AddThis.COM.
Enabling the social media integration in NeatClubs.COM results in an icon like the one below being automatically placed at the top or bottom of select pages on your web-site depending on your preference. You may need to logout and login again before you see the result, but new visitors to your site will see the icon right away after the service is enabled.
If you are logged in with a site administrator account you will see the "Social Media Setup" link appearing in small print under the icon that you can click on to configure the social media setup in NeatClubs.COM.
When a visitor to your web-site clicks on the icon above, they will have the opportunity to post your web-site content to their choice of a large number of social media networking sites shown below.
To make it "super simple" for users to share your web-site content, depending on the social networking service selected, users will be prompted to login to their selected service automatically as shown below. (note that the service knows my username and password since Facebook used in this example which I use frequently "remembers me" as a regular login from this internet location.
We've made it similarly "super simple" to enable social media support in NeatClubs by introducing an "on / off" switch under "System Setup" / "Preferences" / "Utilities". To enable this integration, simple turn the feature "on" and it begins working immediately.
At this time only the share main web-site home page and the documents containing public web-site content are shareable.
To make this work, literally all you need to do is login to your NeatClubs managed site, navigate to the utilities setup screen, and under Social Media Integrations, enable the Addthis.COM social media integration. Once you do this everything, everything should work.
We'd love to take credit for this cool feature ourselves, but we're leveraging the excellent work of the folks at Addthis.COM. (http://addthis.com)
To get maximum value out of this integration, we recommend creating your own account at the http://AddThis.COM web-site. If you create your own account, you should replace the default AddThis.COM AccountID "neatworx" in the NeatClubs.COM setup with your own chosen AddThis.COM account identifier.
After you register a free account with AddThis.COM, you can login to addthis.com at any time and you will see analytics (a sample below) that provides metrics about the numbers of users that have shared your site to various social networking services.
Our integration with Addthis.COM is similar in nature to our integration with Google Analytics, another no-cost service.
We recommend that our customers subscribe to both of these free services. Traffic resulting from enabling the AddThis.COM social media integration built into NeatClubs.COM should be measurable using Google Analytics.