There are quite a few times when I need to quickly lookup one of my social media contacts. I may not be logged into the social service, and if I am, most of the search options aren’t very robust. It also takes too long to reach the search function. Our Contaxio Search Extension for Google Chrome is the perfect answer for these quick searches.

The extension allows you to search Contaxio from within your Chrome browser for Twitter, Facebook, and Google Contacts. I used it just the other day when I couldn’t remember the exact spelling of a Twitter friend’s name.

It’s easy to install and use:

1. Just fire up Chrome and visit the Chrome Web Store: Contaxio Extension
2. Click “Add to Chrome” to install the extension.
3. Once the extension is installed, click on the little blue Contaxio button in your toolbar.
4. Visit the extension’s options page and provide the Contaxio API Key and Secret. (You can find the API Key and Secret in Contaxio on the Settings page.)
5. Save the items in the extension page and you’re ready to search by clicking the blue button again.

This is the first version of this extension and we look forward to your feedback.

In introducing our newest tool to the Contaxio platform, I want to first mention that this is a beta version, and that we will be working diligently to constantly improve this tool. Any feedback is strongly encouraged!

We decided to build up our Facebook tool because of the fact that 92% of social networking users are on Facebook (http://bit.ly/sDqksw). We wanted to provide more insight on friend data for that large segment of social networking.
The friend contextualizer brings you the most popular schools your friends went / are going to, cities they live in, summarizes political and religious affiliations, and breaks your friends down by gender with additional stats on your friends’ relationship statuses. Not only that, but we link to lists of your friends broken down within those specific categories so if you choose to tag and organize them, it’s now easier than ever!

We’re currently developing more advanced filters for you to work with, and are also developing a Facebook “friend profile” that gives you a snapshot summary of your friends with highlighted stats! You just have to log in with Facebook, retrieve data from your friends using the Facebook Manager tool, then click on “Facebook Dashbaord” to learn more about your Facebook friends!

When you’re networking at an event, you need a quick and easy way to connect with other people.  Nothing is easier than email.  Email Contaxio was designed for your mobile device to make it easier to quickly follow someone when you’re on-the-go.

The process is simple:

1. Send an email to Contaxio with a few Twitter usernames.
2. Contaxio will send you a link to a page that will display the profile for each user.
3. Review the Twitter profiles and decide if you’d like to follow your new contacts.

Try it Now

An existing Contaxio account is required.

Setup your Contaxio account and enter your email address under “Settings.”

You must be able to send email from the same email address that was setup in Contaxio.  Check the email setup on your mobile device and try this process before you go out.

Send an email to your Twitter username @contax.io.  Include the Twitter usernames that you’d like to follow in the message body (one on each line).

For example, if my Twitter username is CalHeadlands, I would send an email to CalHeadlands@contax.io.

Contaxio will send you a reply with a special link.

Follow the link.  Review and connect with your new contacts.

You can even search for additional usernames using the search box.

This is a new feature and there are likely to be some adjustments.  Please be patient if you find any issues.  Report problems and suggestions and we will address them as soon as possible.

One useful feature of Contaxio, that may be underutilized, is its Remaining Twitter Call button featured on the bottom left hand corner of the page. This number is always available on the bottom left of the screen while you are working with our Twitter manager tool. I hope to explain the importance of this number and how it affects you, how to build a strategy around it, and how tracking it can avoid account suspension.

Twitter wants to maintain organic growth around its user accounts, hoping to avoid spam and destruction of what the site is all about: organic, word-of-mouth communication to a broad audience. In a situation where these Twitter calls, or actions (more specifically, the action of following or unfollowing a user) were unlimited, it is possible that Twitter would become a place where most users only try to get as many followers as possible, rapidly following new users and just-as-rapidly unfollowing them to make room, all without actually reading and interacting with other users. At least this is my interpretation of what would happen without Twitter call limits.

Regardless, if you push the Twitter limits, your account could be removed from search, or even worse, suspended. (Please refer to the Twitter Rate Limiting section of its site – here https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting). But where is the line drawn for the active user who needs to manage his or her account, unfollow inactives, follow new users, and then repeat? How often can you do this before getting in trouble?

This is where our Twitter call button comes into play. Normally, for authenticated calls (Oauth) you would get 350 calls per hour (150 calls with unauthorized calls), but sometimes, depending on activity, the size of the account (after you are following 2,000 users, your calls are determined by a ratio of followers to following) these calls can be varied. It’s very difficult to manage the different variations of Twitter limits, and can be extremely difficult if you follow and unfollow on a daily, or even weekly, basis without being aware of where your account falls within the spectrum.

By monitoring your Twitter call button on Contaxio, you will know exactly how many actions you have left. You can check before you even begin to follow or unfollow. Not managing this at all runs the risk of having an account suspended or removed from search, avoid this by keeping tabs on your Remaining Twitter Call button and develop a following and unfollowing strategy within those limits. If you aren’t in search, or have low limits for a long period of time, it’s time to contact Twitter. I’ve heard of cases where they’ve accidently taken users out of search, and have even suspended accounts accidently. Take note of your activity, your call number, and if you think something is wrong, contact Twitter immediately.

The drag and drop list feature on Contaxio is my favorite tool on the platform. I’ve noticed over the past year that as I have grown my Twitter account, I have not been able to keep up with all of the various users I have followed. I speak very much from a user-perspective throughout this article, as I shed some light on why this tool is vital for management of larger handles, and why it’s even more vital to retaining the enjoyment from a smaller personal twitter handle. For starters – Twitter is a growing phenomenon. The Huffington post mentions that “In the past year alone, the average number of tweets per day has nearly tripled from 50 million to 140 million.” With growing users and much more activity, how are we all supposed to keep up with all of the users we wish to follow and read through their tweets?

Lists.

I honestly don’t know how a twitter user can comb through a feed of 100 people they follow, let alone thousands or even tens of thousands. If you aren’t armed with tactful hash-tagging search skills, you’ll be losing out on a lot of great tweets. You may be able to quickly connect with people mentioning you, but you’re blind to the larger group you follow, unless you’re willing to spend inordinate amounts of time perusing your timeline for tweets worthy of your attention.
Some have argued to me that they only have 5 or 6 users that they are dedicated to reading through their timeline, but I believe Contaxio lists can make it incredibly easy to organize different groups and sort for those news feeds via Twitter. It’s a very powerful tool for those who hope to keep up with a lot of different users.

The process is very simple. You click the check box for Twitter Lists (see below) to bring up the tool.

Once you have this up, you can select a list you already have in place from the drop down, and begin to edit. You can also add or delete lists as you see fit (just remember to click “Reload” after adding or deleting a list). For this example, I added a new list called “Friends” that will house all of my offline friends who also happen to be on Twitter.

I can search for them in the search bar, and then begin to drag them into my new list. You simply click on which user you want to add to the list, and drag them over. You’ll see below that I’ve added one user, and have begun to drag another user into my list (the clipboard is our drag icon).

This is a quick and easy way to create lists on Twitter, so you can have custom feeds that allow you to track a larger number of users you are following in a much more organized, smooth manner.
You can also tag users in the data tab, so that when you manually search them on our Search bar with the lists tool, you can already have them sorted.
To do this, you simply click on the Data tab for a user profile, and add a private tag (refer to our training tutorial on the Data Tab here. If you’re making a list of your friends, you may tag them all as “Friends” then type this into the search aspect of our list tool. After creating your lists, you can then switch back over to Twitter and enjoy looking through tweet feeds of just your friends, your favorite celebrities, athletes and many other groups you choose to list.

If you want to take the next step in the contact management of your social networks, a good place to start would be with Mailchimp. You can easily add your Twitter friends and followers to a custom list that is fully integrated with Mailchimp, all right from within the Contaxio interface. Provided that person has an e-mail address, you can quickly build and organize these e-mail lists for a variety of uses.

One of the first things you would need to do is create a free Mailchimp account (if you haven’t already, I strongly encourage it; it’s a very useful tool). It doesn’t take much to set up and is very easy to manage after you create the account. Within Mailchimp, you need to create a new list for the e-mail addresses of the Twitter users you want to store and assign it an API key. Once you have everything set up with Mailchimp, you can begin tagging users in Contaxio.

You can tag someone by selecting that particular user, and going into his or her data tab, as seen below. If that person doesn’t have an e-mail address, you can add one in if you have the information.

The next step is to tag the user under “Private Tags” – I have added myself to the Contaxio newsletter list for this particular case, but you can name this tag whatever you want (the API key determines which e-mail list this goes in on Mailchimp, so those two do not have to be the same). You can then continue to tag as many other users as you would like who you want to be a part of this e-mail list.

Once you have finished tagging all of these contacts, navigate to the Contaxio mail lists tool (Twitter >>Navigate >>Mail Lists) to send all of the e-mail addresses over to Mailchimp. You simply need to select which list you want to send (under tags) and then enter in your Mailchimp API key, as seen below.

 
After this, you click “Get Lists” and Contaxio will send the e-mail addresses over to Mailchimp within seconds. If you have users who have already subscribed to this particular list, Contaxio will not send duplicates – you will receive a “Member Already Subscribed” error for any user who is already subscribed to your e-mail list in Mailchimp. However, if you want to update your list with new users that you have tagged, you can certainly do this as many times as you need to, simply by clicking the update list button, which shows up after you integrate the list for the first time. This feature makes it easy for users to quickly group contacts on Twitter who they want to reach out to via e-mail, and then transfer all of that information  to an e-mail campaign service.

Contaxio makes it easy to select random winners from your follower list.

Many people like to express appreciation to their followers on Twitter. This might take the form of a giveaway or even just a thoughtful tweet. You can now use Contaxio to select a lucky follower using the Random Selection filter. The filter is also a fun way to randomly stumble through your follower list.

To select a random follower, signon to Contaxio, navigate to Manage Twitter, and choose the “Random Selection” filter. One random follower will be displayed. Perform additional random selections by clicking on the refresh button.

The random selections are limited to your list of followers in Contaxio, so make sure you’ve performed a recent sync with Twitter. To prevent the selection of stagnant accounts, the filter only includes people who have tweeted in the past 30 days.