Amplify Analysis – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
With this post we start a series of social media network reviews digging deep to find out what works in social networks, what doesn’t work and why.
Dozens of new social networks appear each day trying to mimic a social structure that could possibly lead to the astonishing success of well-known leaders in social space.
Yet many of the freshly cooked networks make mistakes that diminish their chances to become a prominent player in the social field.
Today we’ll look at one such social player – amplify.com, a site that chose a business model of social aggregator.
There are a lot of different aggregators, and they all pretty much parrot each other in functionality which makes them unworthy of any special attention. Amplify.com was smart enough to find its own unique angle which allowed it to stand out from the crowd. This network built its USP around one noticeable Twitter peculiarity –Twitter only allows messages with length up to 140 characters. For Twitter this feature became an arrow that pierced the wall of social noise and lead it to the breakthrough in social communications.
Yet for many bloggers 140 characters is a tight cell to express their thoughts, so when Amplify introduced unlimited text length for messages, ability to post in HTML format (read: possibility to create keyword-targeted back links) and combined those features with aggregator functionality, it made a strong entrance in a crowded space of social networks.
If you were a blogger who had a hard time to express your idea or message in 140 characters, but still wanted your message to appear on Twitter, you could just write a long post in Amplify, post it and it would be posted to Twitter, Facebook ,Tumblr, Freindfeed and many other social networks. No wonder Amplify was popular. Unfortunately after Google Panda update Amplify made some questionable changes, and now its popularity is shrinking.
Let’s see in details what was working in Amplify, what still works after the changes and what features should be redeveloped pronto.
the Good , the Bad and the Ugly in Amplify
The Good:
- Amplify has a good idea targeting a rather large market of frustrated bloggers who find it difficult to fit a message in 140 characters or less yet still doesn’t want to fell off the wagon of Twitter exposure.
- Amplify gives you the opportunity to schedule posts, so you can submit several posts at once but schedule them to be posted later at a specified time.
- Amplify allows you to post messages of up 1000 characters (which is still far more than Twitter does)
Amplify allows you to distribute your message to multiple social networks. - Since it’s a social network, it gives you the opportunity to communicate with your social peers (follow, them, send them private messages, etc) and build your own social community.
- Amplify allows you to post links in the post. Links can’t be keyword-rich anymore, but there is still some SEO benefit of posting to this network (though it’s significantly reduced).
The Bad:
- Previously Amplify allowed to post the messages of unlimited length, now the length was shrunk to 1000 characters.
- Amplify doesn’t allow to post HTML-rich messages anymore. Now you can’t make bold sub-headlines, have no ability to emphasize certain thoughts or add an image. Even worse, you have no chance to get considerable SEO juice through keyword-targeted anchor text. I think this change is the most important reason why Amplify’s popularity is decreasing.
- When you use scheduling feature posts get published in the dedicated time but sharing works in some odd way. We found that scheduled posts are not always distributed through all social networks.
Amplify is often very slow which makes you wonder whether it would be a better use of your time to switch to other social aggregators.
The Ugly:
- When you post a message to Amplify, there is no way to add multiple tags or multiple categories. If you want to add multiple tags and categories, you can use this little hack: after posting a message, go to settings and click “edit your post”, then you’ll be able to add both tags and categories. Of course it’s not very convenient, to say the least.
- We also found that the last two characters of the post are often truncated which is especially bad if the last thing you have in your post is a link. If you use link shortener, a couple characters mean a difference between a link to your post and a link to some obscure site.
In conclusion: Amplify is a good example of a social network that has a great potential yet for now halted its own success by making bad business and development decisions.
———
Opening image from on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.
Related posts:
