Sherpabooks is Social!
As I mentioned a few day ago I've been working with two other college students on a project called Sherpabooks. To quote our site, "Sherpabooks is a textbook price comparison service designed specifically for College students that are tired of paying for overpriced textbooks at their local bookstore." In order to start to get the word out, and get some feedback before we make an official launch, we've decided to try build a small community using Twitter and Facebook pages.
Creating a Twitter account for our company was really straight forward. I initially thought that a company wanting to set up a twitter account would need to go through some sort of special hoop, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that creating a Twitter account for a company is the same as creating an individual Twitter account. While I was glad that I didn't have to go through any extra hoops, it did make me wonder what Twitter has done to prevent abuse. I imagine that they must have some sort of policy in place to prevent username squatting. I imagine if I did some digging in their TOC I could probably find out, but that's besides the point. If you would like to follow Sherpabooks you can find us on twitter @Sherpabooks .
Creating the Facebook page on the other hand, while still simple, had a few more hoops to jump through. While creating a page was relatively simple, in order to get an official Facebook name for that page so that you can have a url like this, http://facebook.com/sherpabooks, required you to have at the very least 25 people "like" the page. Which anyone who is familiar with Facebook knows isn't a difficult task at all. Anyways, feel free to check us out on Facebook at http://facebook.com/sherpabooks, and like us. Another cool feature I found while setting up our Facebook page is that you can link your Facebook page to Twitter so that every time you post something on you're pages Facebook wall it automatically gets tweeted. If anyones interested in finding out more about that you can do so at http://www.facebook.com/twitter/.
So why are we doing all this? Well, to quote Jesse Stay, who's presentation I had the opportunity to listen to last week, you need to fish where the fish are. We know we have a great service and we're already hooked. Now we just need to get everyone else hooked.
The only step left is to start a blog for our site, and that leads to the question to use WordPress or not to use WordPress? WordPress has always been a great product and honestly it's a much better than I remember it being 3 years ago when I last tried it, but I save those thoughts for another post. I guess the question is should we use an existing OSS solution or should we build something new on our existing platform? I hard question that's going to need a little more thought and research.
October 19th, 2010 - 14:03
Good post, useful blog, thank you for your work, keep on, guys!