So now that I’m getting in deep with exploring all the avenues to promote our apps, I inevitably created a facebook page for our company.

http://facebook.com/surjesoftware

Facebook lets me have multiple personalities, because you can decide to log in as the company or the human, which is insanely cool. Now I’ll have to see how to build that page into something useful, or it will become just another internet graveyard for content.

I’m hoping that the social aspect of facebook makes the page useful, which is why I’m going to blog about it tonight, and add a link to the site.

While we are working on our next suite of apps, we continually reflect on how our existing crop of apps is doing. While we are getting some consistent downloads, we figure we may get a greater return on investment from them if we advertize a little bit…

So we’re looking into many advertizing platforms and hope to see which one is most effective. So far we’re looking at :

• Facebook
• Google Adwords
• TwtMob
• iAd (Apple ad network)

I hope to come back to this story in a little while to announce my findings on which was most effective. I’m guessing google or iAD will be most effective, but I’m most intrigued by twtmob and facebook, the more social forms of advertizing. TwtMob in particular is intriguing because I’ll get actual twitter users to hawk our products, which I hope will be more effective than ads on the side of a web page which are more obvious and more easily ignored.

Stay tuned…

Here are my picks for the top 20 must have iPad apps. They are all free and some might have optional in app purchases. The games I chose really showcase the coolness of the iPad, great for showing off to your friends! Of course the news, radio and TV apps I chose pertain to Canadians, in particular for Calgary, so you should search for your local stations/papers in the app store.

News & Weather

CBC News
Calgary Herald
WeatherEye HD

National Post, The Globe and Mail and CTV News also have apps. You may also want to check out CNN, BBC News and The Huffington Post.

Radio, TV & Film

CBC Radio
IMDb Movies & TV
NFB Films for iPad

CTV, CBC and Global all have apps to watch local TV.

Games & Fun

Virtuoso Piano Free 3
CryptoQuip Free
Solitaire Classic
Let’s Create! Pottery HD Lite

Hobbies & Interest

Kobo – 1 million Free Books – Read eBooks!
NASA App HD
Google Earth
170,000+ Recipes: BigOven

Social Networking

Skype for iPad
HootSuite for Twitter

Facebook and Twitter have iPad apps. LinkedIn has an iPhone app only. HootSuite accesses all of your accounts.

Utilities

Free Light
Nightstand Central for iPad Free – Alarm Clock with Weather and Photo Wallpapers
Calculator for iPad – Calc Pro HD Free
Audio Memos Free – The Voice Recorder

In case you have a young toddler who likes to play with your iDevice, check out Bitsy the Spider, the simple toddler app with physics for the rain drops. It’s free  until this Friday, so act now!

In other news, today is the Wikipedia / Craigslist / etc blackout day in protest of legislation being proposed in the US. It’s funny how they speak out in support of the internet when it helps revolutions of Arab states, but want to be able to censor and shut the internet down like China and Iran do. Check out the Wikipedia page on SOPA for more info!

Finally we’ve started exploring advertizing through social media, twitter in particular. We will talk more about that once we find out how effective/ineffective it is.