Banjo Emerges From SXSW, Makes Having Your Business Online More Important Than Ever

We all know how diffuse social networks have been of late. Joining more than one is almost like agreeing to take a part-time job for no pay. Joining several can be the equivalent of a full-time job, again with no pay. But a recent attendee at the South By Southwest show-by the name of Banjo got a serious bump in their download numbers, and as a result, underscored just how important it is to have a social networking presence.

Banjo is an app that recently updated, and this update is what should be putting some extra urgency in your social networking. Banjo’s newest update allows its users–and there are plenty of them–to combine their social networking location activity under one central hub. Basically, instead of people logging into their Facebook to check where one set of friends’ current location is, then doing the same with Twitter and Foursquare and even Instagram, all those updates can be routed to Banjo.

This in turn gives users a lot more incentive to make their updates, as they’ll no longer need to tell their Facebook friends where they are, and then their Twitter feeders and the like; they’ll simply need to update just one feed, and then all their friends–assuming they have Banjo and they haven’t activated the individual friend blocker capability so you can’t see where they’re going–will know regardless of what feed they happen to be on at the time via simple feed.

As to why this underscores the need to be visible via social media, plain and simple, your customers are. The more they tell their friends about your business–one great screenshot of Banjo shows a young lady describing for her Twitter feed, with the hashtag happy, about a great place for lunch with a terrific selection for her friends. And when you consider that Banjo started life just nine months ago, and has been seeing a fairly steady uptick in users, at least on Facebook. In just those nine months, it’s up to about 900,000 users, and it picked up 100,000 of those in the time it exhibited at SXSW. And of them, about half a million are active users, with iOS users outnumbering Android by two to one.

Now would you like to be the great place for lunch that that young lady described earlier? And wouldn’t you like to know about it when that tweet hit? Even better, wouldn’t you like to be able to issue a coupon for free drinks with any entree, with the hashtag extrahappy? You see the possibilities unfurl before you with this. And for all those extra people following the advice of the happy hashtag, you’ll want to get in some quality cloud-based telephony features to improve the customer service experience, including call hold and transfer services and a toll-free number.

Banjo is gearing itself toward the mainstream user, which is even better news, so getting your business up on a Facebook profile or the like is an idea that just might pay some dividends.