Are you having trouble promoting a product or cause without being overly in-your-face to followers? Sure, you might be passionate about clean water in Africa or Lady Gaga but not all day everyday.
When it comes to shortening URLs, bit.ly has been the go-to weapon for social media. Now Bre.ad is breaking into the online scene to give them a run for their money. Bre.ad is reinventing the URL shortener as a promotional tool for brands and causes.
making toast
Bre.ad, which is currently available in Beta, gives shortened links five seconds of personalized promotion before taking you to your final destination. It also syncs to Twitter and Facebook and provides easy to track click analytics, by inserting “Bre.ad/” before the URL in the address bar.
Once you’re logged in, Bre.ad allows users to create personalized pages, or “toasts” complete with “billboards”, an avatar and a tailored message. Your billboard can be a brand, a cause, or a deliberate self-promotion.
The five second pre-roll can be very effective when used appropriately. It adds a little pizzazz to tweet links and Facebook posts without being excessively intrusive or aggressive about your promotion. It also gives your followers a little insight into what the brand means to its creators and employees outside of “that company I follow on Twitter.”
bre.ad revolution
People may think they are seeing an advertisement when a Toast page appears, however, it is not a pop-up or an ad. Bre.ad is more of a personal endorsement for something you want the world to know about. It’s a great way to take your social media marketing up a notch. If you have some cause or brand to promote, why not put it in front of people who already want to visit your page?