Android Social Media

We are please to announce the official launching of our first ever “Android Social Media User Manual.” This helpful E-book will help Android users who wish to create and maintain an active online presence in social media and generate an online revenue without wasting endless hours in front of a computer screen.
This manual is about FREEDOM. The freedom to leave your office and continue to be just as productive and effective from your Android phone. This Ebook is 100% FREE OF CHARGE!!! Here is a preview to what’s inside:

• Overview of Internet Marketing & Social Media Principles
• Overview of Mobile Internet and Utilizing the Android device
• Specific App reviews and instructions to help you create & syndicate content, track results, and create relationships
• App Indexes to all the standard Social Media websites including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Freindfeed, Plurk, Blogger, Wordpress, and More.
• Productivity Apps that will help you get more done in less time including an overview of how best to utilize Android Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, etc.

Fill out this simple form to get your E-Book emailed to you right away!

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Video marketing has become a big trend in Internet Marketing because of the ways videos are listed on the search engines. If you can syndicate your video to enough of the biggest video based social websites such as Youtube you can get quick results. Videos are also a big part of social media because of their ability to form relationships and share a more “real you” with others.

The key is in the syndication. How do you create a high quality video with the correct title and description and then get it syndicated to as many websites as possible? Traditionally people without amazingly cool cell phones have used services such as TrafficGeyser.com and TubeMogul.com which both offer video syndication to a vast network of video websites such as Youtube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv, MetaCafe, etc. Now that we are going all mobile (THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS WEBSITE) we need to understand how this can be best accomplished from the Android device.

With the update to the 1.5 firmware on the Android platform earlier this year all Android devices now come standard with a camcorder app. By default you can share a video directly to Youtube.com. When you upload to Youtube you can select a title, description and tags but can only upload videos up to 3MB.

www.pixelpipe.com

I prefer the PixelPipe Pro app which will upload all videos regardless of size and also allows a title, description, and tags. Furthermore Pixelpipe will automatically upload your video to Youtube, Facebook Video, DailyMotion, and others. It will also update your status (tweet) the title for you along with link to the video on twitter, facebook, myspace, friendfeed, bebo, hi5, plaxo, and up to 40 other social networking sites. THAT IS POWERFUL SYNDICATION coming from a cell phone.

When syndicating a video consider the following helpful hints:

Taking video from a cell phone is naturally not as high of quality as other video recorders. Hold the phone extra steady while recording and consider your lighting conditions. Poorly lighted places will make for very poor videos.

Choosing a title for your videos is an important process. In addition to letting people know the general content of your video you also need to make a title compelling enough to make it worth watching. If your title shows up on twitter with a link will people click it? Questions often make powerful titles and including the word “video” will let people who see the tweet or status update know that the link will lead them to a video.

The description is your best place to put keywords in paragraph form while describing the video content. Including a url to your main site or blog will also help in SEO efforts.

The tags are keywords. Be creative. You want to consider keywords that people may use to search for you and your content without using the overly used cliches of your niche.

Jacob S. Paulsen
www.jacobspaulsen.com

Our site content generally surrounds the realms of social networking, internet marketing, and general productivity from the Android device and so many will think this post is out of place but I don’t think so.

A smartphone is designed to combine cell phones and PDAs into 1 device, but the latest smartphones including the Android also combine the popular MP3 device. While many will see this as a chance to carry around their favorite music we would encourage you to use this feature to grow and develop. Load audiobooks onto your Android and listen wherever you are. The built in music player app is very good although many fancier options exist in the Android Market.

The Video Player app seems to be your best option to watch standard video files. FormatFactory is a great freeware program for ripping your DVDs into Android compatible video files but almost any software will do the trick. There are also a handful of youtube downloader apps in the market that will permit you to download your favorite and most inspiration videos to your sd card.

On my 2GB sd card I can fit a full standard audiobook and 3 full movies in addition to all the pictures and other files that fit on the card. Regardless of your past experience with Ipods or other MP3 devices I encourage you to take full advantage of the opportunity that you carry in your pocket to learn and grow from good books and movies that you can fit onto your SD card!

Jacob S. Paulsen
www.jacobspaulsen.com

In our original PixelPipe post we talked about the power of the PixelPipe photo syndication app. Today we want to add to that chain of thought by talking about the new 1.5 pixelpipe app which supports video & audio uploads as well. The new Android version 1.5 added the ability to upload videos directly to Youtube.com While this is a great feature on its own it doesn’t begin to compare with PixelPipe. Let me give you an example.

Today while grilling some steaks in the back yard I took a short video clip of my crazy dog trying to “bite” the smoke out of the air. I chose the share option and instead of choosing Youtube I shared it via Pixelpipe. What did this do? Not only did it directly upload the video complete with title, description, and tags to YouTube but it also uploaded it to Dailymotion.com and Facebook video. Then it also updated my status on all 18 of the social networks I participate on to include the title and link to the video. All of this from the camcorder app on my Android… THATS COOL.

Get an account at PixelPipe.com if you haven’t already and then download the pixelpipe app from the android market. From either the app or the website set up your “pipes” to include all of your photo, video, and social networking websites. Give it a test run… go ahead… syndicate a photo, video, or audio…
How cool was that?

Ok, I know this site is all about Android + Social Media but sometimes as a team we have to bring you a few things that have nothing at all to do with Social Media or even a few things that have nothing to do with Android. We can’t help it. Today we want to do the first of those two. Departing from social media and online marketing lets venture into the subject of geocaching on your android phone.

What is geocaching? In few words, geocaching is a hobby where you go look for small containers of random stuff that are hidden all over in random places. Yep… sounds cool doesn’t it? We think it is. The hobby of geocaching has gained massive followers in the last several years. Mainly supported by www.geocaching.com there are currently 782,783 active hidden caches in the world.

There is a certain thrill that comes from finding one of these hidden containers right down the street from where you live. Knowing that people walk past it everyday and that you found it’s hidden contents is just… COOL. (Do people still use the word “cool” ?)

Well, now that the G1 has come out with a built in GPS antenna the possibilities of geocaching have been extended. You no longer need a Garmin or similar GPS device. Just grab your phone and go to it. There are several apps popping up in the android market for the purpose of geocaching but our favorite is Geobeagle. This FREE application does everything you need to do. You can access an online list of caches near your current location and browse by map or by list. Download the coordinates directly onto your phone from the browser and then go looking. The geobeagle app also works in conjuction with the radar app to help you find the hidden caches quicker than with Google maps alone.

After you find it you will be able to visit the webpage of that cache and log your visit right away. We are super pleased with the geobeagle app and its potential for this great hobby. We love it so much that we decided to get in touch with the developers to see what plans they have for future updates. While then don’t want to spoil all the secrets we did manage to get this much from Steve over at the Geobeagle development team. He did tell us, ” We generally do a release every two weeks with fixes and improvements.  In particular, we are moving to a new UI design which should make GeoBeagle easier to use.  We also plan to support cache logging from your phone in the near-term.” In addition Steve asked us to remind all of our site subscribers to contact them with any bugs or feature requests!  – Thanks Steve!!!

Just to give you a final insight into GeoBeagle and this great hobby Brandon & Jacob (“the team”) went out the other day to give you a demonstration. Here is the video.

This is a two part post. First we need to discuss rss feeds. As you begin to network with others online you will begin to want/need to subscribe to other people’s blogs. This is how you invest in yourself in social media. Find the best people whom you can learn from and subscribe to their blogs.

The term RSS feed refers to a consistent feed of new information that can be subscribed to. Blogs, news sites, and twitter profiles are all in the format of RSS. There are lots of different ways to subscribe via email etc but the most effective way is by utilizing a RSS reader. The most popular of which is Google Reader.

If you have an Android phone (we have to assume you do) you will also find a HUGE increase in effectiveness by reading blogs from your phone. It will decrease wasted time in a big way!

NewsRob is the best program available for the android platform right now. It downloads content to your phone’s SD card. It syncs directly with your google reader account. It works fairly well and has some decent options. Newsrob has released two updates in the last 7 days and I’m more pleased than ever. It allows for easy reading of your blogs and I love that it syncs the statuses. It downloades new entries in the background so that when you open the program you are ready to start reading.

Newsrob also allows for you to share articles in google reader or by email. This program really is fantastic.

Remember that our overall goal is to maintain an online presence in social media without wasting a lot of time or becoming tied to our computers. This program is a HUGE part of making that happen.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Source: http://newsrob.com/

Wow! Twitter is quick becoming the most popular/powerful of Social Media websites. There are a lot of different twitter apps out there for the G1, android platform but so far Twidroid is my favorite.

In looking for a twitter app it was important to me to find something would allow me to send and receive both @ replies and direct messages. It also needed to display new messages in the notification bar.

Twidroid does all of this. Here is a quick glance at all their twitter features:

• full-featured twitter client
  • postings, replies & direct messages
  • user detail information
  • follow/unfollow a user
  • auto-completion of your contact names
  • secured operation via SSL
  • option to use identi.ca instead of twitter
  • option to use twitter compatible APIs (e.g. laconi.ca)
• integrates directly with android’s browser & gallery for sharing
• GPS location support to update your profile or embed into photos
• location-based nearby search
• directly integrated photo-posting from cam or disk via phodroid and twitpic
• directly integrated search through all public tweets
• native url-shortening
• background notifications for replies & direct messages
• auto layout for landscape and portrait mode
• custom alert ringtones
• API to send tweets from your android application
• ‘buzz’ feature that allows you to view today’s most talked about stories on twitter directly in the app.

If anyone else would like to suggest a twitter app do so by making comment below or by visiting our suggested content page above! Here are some screenshots:

Source: http://twidroid.com/

Youtube is one of the most powerful social media sites online. It is also the 3rd most popular website in the world! While I don’t believe the android application good enough of a tool to really take advantage of the site and what it offers; it still is nice. I love being able to click on links in emails and on sites that lead back to youtube and have those open right up in my application.

Check out this official Google video about the Youtube andoird application