Rating: Create QR codes for marketing materials for free
Continuing our theme of pumping up all things QR/2D barcode, GoMo News has followed up a hot tip from SocialQRcode which claims to be the ‘first ever QR code generator designed for social sharing and social media. The company’s QR codes work with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Android Market and the iTunes App Store. Anyone who wants to use it can simply sign up for the service free of charge. Significantly, one of the areas where SocialQRcode sees the codes being used is in marketing campaigns. “Decide which social medium to connect and print your social QR code on brochures, billboards, and bus stops,” the company says.Once you’ve signed up, the system presents you with five immediate choices.
These are creating a link to your Facebook page; a link to a Facebook share; a link to Twitter or a Twitter share and a YouTube video.
Then there’s another seven alternative choices which include creating a vCard (business card); coupon; web URL; email; phone number; app site: and text.
It’s actually one of the easiest to use 2D barcode generating sites that we’ve come across.
Once you’ve decided what your ‘marketing message’ is, you can download the appropriate QR code as a .png or .jpg file.
When you read the QR code with a decent barcode reader such as NeoReader from NeoMedia, you’ll find a URL that directs you via the SocialQRcode site itself.
This procedure enables the company to display a small banner ad to those who read the QR code. In our case we tried creating a Twitter share QR code.
The data to be shared was the URL for our friends’ blog, Countdown2MWC.
Strangle, because the process used Twitter’s own URL shortener, t.co rather than bit.ly, the URL seemed to expand in the tweet. Not sure why.
Anyway, GoMo News can see plenty of app developers using this site to create the QR code that promotes their Android or Apple iOS app.
Our test QR code
We like the thinking behind SocialQRcode.
