Paul Chaney
Paul Chaney is a contributor for Practical Ecommerce, having written his first article in August 2005.
Paul is author of The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media (published by John Wiley & Sons), and The F-Commerce Handbook: 10 Secrets for Unlocking the Sales Potential of Facebook and The Social Commerce Handbook: 20 Secrets for Turning Social Media into Social Sales, both of which are published by McGraw-Hill.
Connect with Paul via email at pchaney@gmail.com.
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Social Media
6 Reasons to Use Instagram for Ecommerce
July 2, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Online retailers use many photos and videos on their websites. With its focus on imagery, Instagram is a place where merchants can showcase their products, build their brands, and increase ...
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Social Media
Facebook’s New ‘Ad Preferences’ Could Help Users, Advertisers
June 26, 2014 • Paul Chaney
In June, Facebook announced the launch of a new feature that allows users to exert more control over the ads they see. Called “ad preferences,” it is a tool accessible ...
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Social Media
6 New Ways to Use Pinterest in your Ecommerce Business
June 24, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Pinterest helps people find inspiration, pursue their interests, and discover things they may not know about. According to Pinterest, user interests fall into five categories. Passion. Such as music, photography or sports. Profession.
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Social Media
Google Places Is Now ‘Google My Business’
June 17, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Google Places, which contained information Google used when listing a local business in search returns, has been renamed Google My Business. There is more to the switch than merely rebranding ...
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Social Media
How to Use Hashtags on Social Media Posts
June 10, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Hashtag use on social networks is common. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, and others all permit hashtags. Hashtags categorize content of social media posts, and thus facilitate conversations and engagement. For ...
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Social Media
4 Examples of Hashtags in Social Commerce
June 4, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Hashtags are a staple among social media users as a mechanism for promotion and, more recently, payment. Hashtags help to build communities around specific topics. They also serve as trackable referral ...
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Social Media
Facebook Introduces 3 New Advertising Features
May 29, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Facebook continually makes changes to its advertising platform. Typically, this is little more than user interface modifications in Ads Manager. But on occasion the changes are more noteworthy. Three recent ...
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Social Media
5 Social Customer-management Tools for Small Business
May 21, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Digital marketing is data driven. Merchants can now use data to market to their prospects with greater insight and more intelligence than ever before. Customer relationship management tools can help with ...
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Design & Dev Tools
10 Tools to Create Social Media Graphics
May 14, 2014 • Paul Chaney
With millions of images uploaded each day, social media is now a visual medium. Platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, and Vine make sharing photos and videos much easier than ...
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Social Media
Using Twitter’s New Website Card to Drive Traffic
May 7, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Twitter cards are a recent advertising product that facilitates attaching rich media experiences to tweets, to promote content. Of the nine cards available, two do not require a developer, and therefore ...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Blogs: How to Grow Readership, Improve SEO
April 30, 2014 • Paul Chaney
If you maintain a blog with your ecommerce site, honing your copywriting skills can make it more popular and increase the possibility it will appear higher in search results. Online copywriting ...
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Social Media
5 Tips to Increase Facebook News Feed Views
April 17, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Facebook made recent modifications to News Feed, presumably to reduce the amount of spammy posts coming from Pages. These posts typically fall into three categories: Like-baiting, frequently circulated, and spammy ...
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Social Media
10 Places to Find Social Media Content
April 9, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Consumers crave the constant stream of content that emanates from social networks. It is one of the reasons they visit them with such frequency. For marketers, the job of sharing content ...
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Social Media
8 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Existing Marketing
April 3, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ can be high efficiency platforms that serve as a hub for all your social media engagement activities. Video and photo sharing sites such ...
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Social Media
Twitter Testing Design that Resembles Facebook Pages
March 27, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Twitter is testing a new layout that closely resembles to Facebook Pages. This comes just weeks after a change that aligned the design of the desktop and mobile versions. No date ...
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Social Media
Changes to Facebook Pages, News Feed, Ads Affect Merchants
March 13, 2014 • Paul Chaney
If there is one constant with Facebook, it’s change. Once again, the social network has made changes to Pages, News Feed, and ads that directly affect marketing efforts. Facebook Pages Just this ...
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Social Media
6 Social Media Analytics Tools for Merchants
March 5, 2014 • Paul Chaney
The rise of Big Data has prompted many merchants to utilize data analysis for informed marketing decisions. With its vast amount of data available, social media is an important channel ...
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Social Media
Using Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences to Find Ecommerce Prospects
February 25, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Facebook offers two advanced advertising options to help merchants reach existing customers and identify new prospects. One option, Custom Audiences, consists of a list of existing customers that is uploaded to Facebook ...
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Social Media
Creating Facebook Ads Using ‘Custom Audiences’
February 19, 2014 • Paul Chaney
One Facebook advertising option you don’t hear much about is Custom Audiences. It helps companies reach current customers and prospects. Only large advertisers could previously participate in Custom Audiences, but ...
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Social Media
Using a LinkedIn Company Page to Showcase your Business
February 12, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Due to its focus on people in professional occupations, LinkedIn is often the social network of preference for B-to-B ecommerce companies. With more than 277 million members, it is the ...
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Social Media
7 Ways to Use Social Media to Tell Stories
February 6, 2014 • Paul Chaney
The Super Bowl is known for two things: the football game and the commercials that air during it. While this year’s Super Bowl proved to be lackluster in so far as ...
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Social Media
Facebook Algorithm Change Favors Link-share Posts
January 29, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Facebook recently announced a change to its algorithm that adversely affects the way a certain type of Page update appears in News Feed. According to Facebook’s Chris Turitzin, product manager, News ...
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Social Media
6 Ways to Use a Facebook Page for Year-round Holidays
January 22, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Just because Christmas and New Years have passed does not mean the holidays are over. Even though they pale in comparison to the Christmas season in terms of retail sales, holidays ...
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Social Media
Social Marketplaces Can Benefit Ecommerce Merchants
January 14, 2014 • Paul Chaney
Online marketplaces bring buyers and sellers together to exchange goods and services. Social media encourages marketplace mentality by enabling product discovery in a social environment, where prospective customers can rely ...
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Social Media
Social Media Advertising Necessary in 2014?
January 8, 2014 • Paul Chaney
One of the trends likely to dominate social media marketing in 2014 is advertising. Facebook said that advertising would ensure posts are more visible in News Feed. Twitter continues to push ...
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Social Media
For Ecommerce, 12 Social Media Essentials for 2014
January 1, 2014 • Paul Chaney
The onset of a new year is a good time to step back and analyze what worked and what didn’t with social media. Here are 12 practices that can start ...
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Social Media
Social Media and the Zero Moment of Truth
December 24, 2013 • Paul Chaney
In 2011, Google introduced the term Zero Moment of Truth to describe how people shop. A ZMOT is someone’s subjective experience with a product that, when shared, influences another person’s purchase ...
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Social Media
Using ‘Instagram Direct’ for Ecommerce Marketing
December 18, 2013 • Paul Chaney
Instagram, the photo sharing application owned by Facebook, just launched direct messaging. Called Instagram Direct, users who follow each other can now send private messages containing photos or 15-second videos in ...
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Social Media
Facebook Wants ‘High Quality’ Content; 8 Tips for Merchants
December 12, 2013 • Paul Chaney
Views from organic Facebook Page posts have been declining. A recent announcement from Facebook explains why. “On a given day, when someone visits News Feed, there are an average of 1,500
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Social Media
Does Social Media Impact Ecommerce Sales?
December 4, 2013 • Paul Chaney
Black Friday online sales hit a record of $1.2 billion, according to published reports. But only a very small percentage of those sales could be attributed to social media, says ...
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