Why people are using social rating.
Kohrus rate is a unique WordPress rating plugin that lets your site visitors rate posts or pages on your site by simply tweeting votes to the Twitter timeline. With the depreciation of trust of sites that use cookies to track users behaviour, it’s imperative webmasters find alternate ways to validate user interaction.
Imagine a reader of your next blog post passing on his or her opinion to 1,500 of their friends because they love your new post so much.
Now imagine the next tweet from a good friend, they’ve rated something important to you, how engaged would you be … That’s why you should install Kohrus rate now.
Key features
- Install in 1 minute, no coding needed.
- No need to intrude users privacy by using cookies or IP’s to track voters.
- Improved score trust as users can’t cheat like other cookies/IP based systems.
- Automatically thank voters.
- Realtime updated score.
- Built right on top of WordPress.
- View complete stats of page engagement.
- Stats of twitter accounts who voted.
- No need for user to authorize app.
- Simple one time account setup.
- Full tweet editor, easily edit tweet string and voting elements.
- Automatically shortens URL ’s.
- Easy to use voting GUI .
- Bespoke template placement.
Note
I thought I would write this note as a few of you have asked about integrating Facebook and other networks.
Twitter over Facebook
Superficially using Facebook seems possible as a user can post content to Facebook in a format we want. Initially when I started building the plugin I did some investigation and found the following issues.
The user should only need to be logged into their social account to place a vote. So as part of the core user experience the plugin should not need to be given permission by the user to place a vote. This is because its too much of a hurdle to expect a user to have to approve the app, then place a vote especially as current voting functionality doesn’t require the user to validate into an application. Facebook only allows the functionality we need with an official app so every user would need to approve app before placing score.
Even if we did have an approved version I couldn’t confidently predict the app could crawl content effectively to register the score due to no small point as having global permission conflicts.
Facebook filters the updates from friends a user sees in a manner that isn’t manageable so the core benefit of the app (broadcasting sentiment to friends) becomes useless. A user can also block updates from apps so again the core point of broadcasting sentiment via social is broken.
Conclusion
I built the app as I wanted a way for my users to broadcast the opinions on my content , I use the plugin myself as a rating app and a visitor multiplier and it works really well:).
I want to assure you that I have looked at Facebook and google+ and I didn’t exclude them because I couldn’t be bothered or missed the opportunity but simply because they excluded themselves in both practical and technical aspects. If an opportunity arises that I can add other networks I will seriously look again at integration.
HTH