austinpreneur

Quick links to your company Facebook page and Twitter search

For most of my companies that I work with I've created quick links to our Facebook page as well as a Twitter search for our company. This makes it really easy to promote the pages by word of mouth (literally) or on Twitter where every character counts.

For example, if you want to go to OtherInbox's Facebook page, you can just type in facebook.otherinbox.com (or even shorter, facebook.oib.com). That link is a redirect that sends you to our Facebook fan page for OtherInbox.

To see what people are saying about OtherInbox right now, go to twitter.otherinbox.com. That link is a redirect that sends you to a pre-defined search on search.twitter.com.

Here's how to set it up for yourself.

Go to your Facebook fan page. The URL will probably look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

I don't know why Facebook does this because its unnecessary and really ugly, but you probably want to clean it up first. Look for the "/pages/" that appears the farthest to the right (it could be in there twice). Delete everything to the left of it other than "www.facebook.com".

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now this is the nice URL to your Facebook fan page: 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now all you do is set up a web redirect for a certain web page or domain name to go that URL. I like to use custom domain names because I think they are easy to remember: facebook.oib.com. However, you could also do oib.com/facebook just as easily. I use Register.com's RComExpress service to host my domains and they have a great feature where you can set up a subdomain and enter a page for it to redirect to and they take care of the rest. 

Next, I do the same thing for Twitter search and twitter.otherinbox.com. First I go to search.twitter.com and manually type in the search that finds the content that I want to show. 

For OtherInbox that is:

otherinbox OR "other inbox" OR #OIB OR oib.com OR "mr. spam" OR mrspam OR "mr spam"

which results in the URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=otherinbox+OR+%22other+inbox%22+OR+%23OIB+OR+oib.com

+OR+%22mr.+spam%22+OR+mrspam+OR+%22mr%20spam%22

When I tried to put that URL into Register.com's redirect it didn't like some of the characters, so I put it into TinyURL first and put the resulting TinyURL into Register.com's redirect. But that worked fine.

It doesn't take long to set up, and I find it quite handy. I hope you do too!

Do you know any entrepreneurs who could use $20k in cash, $20k in free stuff, and 20 successful mentors for their startup?

I need your help to get the word out to entrepreneurs about a program that may help them.

I am a mentor and investor in Capital Factory, a new seed capital and mentorship program in Austin. We're choosing 3 startups to spend 10 weeks here to build their company. They receive $20k in cash, $20k in free stuff, and 20 successful mentors as investors. The 10 weeks end in August with a Demo Day to potential investors. It's the mentor's job to ensure they head in the right direction, and introduce them to potential customers and investors.

http://capitalfactory.com

This is an unbeatable opportunity for a technology-based entrepreneur to get an accelerated start, especially in tough times. The reason I'm emailing you is the deadline of April 3 to apply is fast approaching. I want any entrepreneur in your network to have the opportunity to consider this program.

Could you take a few minutes to forward this to your network? Or introduce me to someone who may be interested?

If you're on Twitter or Facebook, please update your status with:  

RT @CapitalFactory get $20k in cash, $20k in free stuff, and 20 mentors to help launch your startup http://capitalfactory.com (please RT)

I appreciate your help. Think of it as rebuilding our economy one startup at a time!