If we are using this blog as a case study, you have set up your business (real world and/or online) and now have a few auctions on eBay and have maybe set up at least 1 store with ebid and items on there as well.
The next part is to use the Ebid links you have with social media to market your products as well as your store.
When you go into your item listing the logos of the various direct linked social media platforms are there. On the left hand menu under 'My Options' at the bottom is My Social Networks. Click on that and you are presented with the various Networks, open up tabs and have the ones you have joined open ready and logged in. When you click on each link to follow or like Ebid will automatically update with your status. It is that easy, then when you wish to market an item click on the logo and select where you want it to be displayed.
Social media has maybe been the biggest revolution in the last 10 years, millions daily use 1 platform or more and for free you can get exposure onto the biggest market there is. I started by watching Youtube videos on affiliate marketing, but then realised that those techniques could be adapted to work with small business. There are companies out there that do this but they charge a lot of money to do the same thing you can do for free.
They all take work and time to build, nothing happens overnight, but a bit of planning and just sticking to between 20 minutes to an hour a day you can really boost how many people will see your items. You are not really looking for a youtube video to go viral but if you can get 10K people seeing every one of your posts then that has to be good for business.
At this time I have not used Instagram, but i am looking at it, so i would not like to put here anything about it until I have used it properly and can give you some figures on it.
Social Media Networks
1.Facebook: The daddy of them all, reportedly getting almost 1 billion different users a day on it and can find a page for virtually any niche there is. A must for your marketing arsenal.
2.Twitter: quick small posts, has millions using it and brilliant for clickbait and SEO ranking.
3.Google+: The 2nd biggest social media platform there is, and with links to SEO, Youtube, Gmail, google search really boosts your brand.
4.Tumblr: a mini blogger with real long term exposure for your posts. so much can be done with your home page from putting on music to theme templates a good place to start if you don’t wish to devote too much time to blogging.
5.Pinterest: My personal favourite, doubling in size every year since 2011, your pins (what your posts are called) can be seen for months after. New algorithms from Pinterest means that things you put on can appear on feeds months after you put them on. However with work these can be updated all the time.
These are the big 5 I use, some people use more, others only use 1 or 2. However you can link posts to feed onto other platforms halving the work but getting the specific exposure you require. When it comes to social networks you have to decide what works best for your message or brand, and what your time dictates you have to work on each.
Lets face it your here, you know how to register to get onto websites, so I wont bore you with the basic’s of internet usage.
Getting onto all these sites is easy, hell that’s what these companies want is ease of registration for people to get on there. They don’t want hard, tough registration, they want everyone able to use it.
One thing I do suggest is keep personal and business separate, your customers don’t want to know your feelings on Trump, or the EU etc. Hell you don’t want to put off potential sales by politics, rivalry. As a business anyones money is good enough, even Chester supporters!!!
What all social media marketers emphasise is a good homepage. Quick and to the point, explaining what you are doing. You don’t need to put on you have a cat called Mitsy, or your favourite colour. But if you are selling stamps, you need to have that in your homepage.
On your homepage should be links to where you want people to go, preferably your store so they can see updates regular and just click on the picture and takes the potential buyer straight to the product.
Where there are loads of blog posts about this and further in depth, again I have seen there is a tidbit of information and to get the full story you have to buy an e-book, or subscribe and pay for a tutorial course. I hope this blog will get you started in the world and show you some of the things I have found worked for my business. Then you can judge what, if any, courses you think would help if your budget allows.
To find some of the blogs just follow my pinterest board
Social Media Marketing
or as you can see my twitter widget to the side
Network Tree
For posts you can link between various platforms, create a family of links, this used to work well for SEO ratings but Google last year changed the algorithms so that familial links don’t count so high on the SEO register.
As you can see you can link all platforms to twitter, however even though it is possible to link twitter posts they do not look good and could end up hurting your message.
The beauty of twitter is lots of posts don’t hurt as they are short lived, but try to space out the timing, with use of scheduling tools this can be done without fuss.
This is post automation, where posting on the one site automatically posts to another.
So looking at the Ebid example, you pin your item listing to a board and have linked to twitter, the pinterest link is what will be displayed on twitter. So when someone clicks on that link they will go first to your pinterest page, then they would have to click again to redirect to your listing.
However while spamming is not welcome on Twitter you can have the same item promoted from all 5 accounts, all have different links but all backlink to the item and displayed at different times.
This is post automation, where posting on the one site automatically posts to another.
So looking at the Ebid example, you pin your item listing to a board and have linked to twitter, the pinterest link is what will be displayed on twitter. So when someone clicks on that link they will go first to your pinterest page, then they would have to click again to redirect to your listing.
However while spamming is not welcome on Twitter you can have the same item promoted from all 5 accounts, all have different links but all backlink to the item and displayed at different times.
Future Posts
A shorter post this week as this is only an introduction to using social media with your online retail business.
Over the coming few weeks I will explore each of the Networks I use in depth along with apps and tools I use to schedule and post. We will look at how to get engaged followers so we can get to a point where you can grow organically but on a large scale.
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