Paul Chaney - Practical Ecommerce - Page 6 of 11

Articles by: Paul Chaney

Paul Chaney

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.

Social Media
10 Ways to Encourage Customer Ratings and Reviews

December 26, 2012 • Paul Chaney

According to Nielsen’s "Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages" report, which surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries, 92 percent of consumers said they trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising. From an ecommerce ...
Social Media
5 Sites for Consumer Product Discovery

December 18, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Social media has inspired a new kind of shopping that is based on peer-to-peer sharing of content on sites like Pinterest, Etsy, or Shopcade, and less known sites such as LoveIt or Wanelo. This consumer-driven trend is referred to as "discovery." For many consumers, shopping is as muc...
Social Media
How to Create a Google+ Community

December 11, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Google+ is growing. According to a Google executive, more than 500 million people have set up profiles, 235 million actively use Google+ functionality such as Hangouts (its video chat feature) and sharing links (via the +1 button), and 135 million use Google+ as a stand-alone social net...
Social Media
Designing a Facebook Marketing Campaign in 4 Steps

December 4, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Marketing on Facebook involves four basic steps: Build, Connect, Engage and Influence, a process Facebook now refers to as the BCEI framework. This article outlines these four steps and explains how ecommerce merchants can use them to execute an effective Facebook marketing campaign. ...
Social Media
6 Sites to Monitor Facebook Changes

December 4, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook is notorious for making changes to its platform. Often, such changes are made with little notice or fanfare, unless you know where to look. Staying abreast of such changes is important to any merchant who wishes to use Facebook marketing more effectively. In this article, I p...
Social Media
Amazon and Pinterest Add Business Pages

November 26, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ have their own versions of business pages. Now, Amazon and Pinterest do, too. Amazon Marketing Services Amazon has quietly launched what it refers to as Amazon ...
Social Media
Top 10 Social Sharing Buttons for Your Website

November 21, 2012 • Paul Chaney

One of the best ways to get traffic to your website is through the use of social sharing buttons. The problem, however, is that while many social sharing options exist, their features vary. Some offer fewer sharing options, some only work on WordPress, and some require more technical ex...
Social Media
13 Facebook Marketing Apps Worth Your Attention

November 14, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook’s modifications to fan pages — most importantly the shift to Timeline — has reduced the use of specialized, third-party marketing apps. However, that does not mean these apps have ...
Social Media
Facebook Simplifies Ad Creation Process

November 6, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook has simplified its ad campaign creation process. The changes address (a) the redesign of the user interface, (b) a concentrated focus on marketing goals and objectives, and (c) the ability to easily use different ad types. To create an ad using the revised system, follow thes...
Social Media
9 Blogging Lessons for Ecommerce Merchants

November 1, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Blogging is a combination of science and art. The science part requires that bloggers use the latest search-engine-optimization tactics. The art is to hone writing and editing skills. But it doesn't have to be as difficult as that may sound. As a longtime blogger and journalist, I've ...
Social Media
LinkedIn Updates Member Profiles

October 30, 2012 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn recently launched a new version of its user profiles. It will be available to all members in the coming weeks. More than just a design change, the new profile increases your opportunity to make connections, tell your professional story, and engage with others in your network. ...
Social Media
How to Set Up a YouTube Channel

October 23, 2012 • Paul Chaney

A "Channel" is YouTube's equivalent of a Facebook page. You must create a YouTube Channel to upload videos, comment on videos, or create "playlists" — collections of different videos by topic. In this article I discuss how to set up a YouTube Channel, to help market your business. ...
Social Media
Pinterest: Tap Shared Interests for Ecommerce Sales

October 17, 2012 • Paul Chaney

How many times have you purchased a product just because one of your Facebook friends did? Likely, your answer is, "Not very often." As retailers, we make a mistake to think that people rely exclusively on their social graph — the network of friends on social networks. More often, they...
Social Media
LinkedIn Retools Company Pages

October 8, 2012 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn recently launched a redesign of its Company Pages. It initially offered the redesign to a few select companies. But last week, it made the redesign available to all businesses. LinkedIn described it all in a blog post. Merchants should consider updating their company pages to ...
Social Media
The 4-Step Social Media Content Strategy

October 3, 2012 • Paul Chaney

In a crowded online marketplace where smaller retailers are forced to vie against large ones, creating useful content is one way to garner consumer attention and trust. This is especially true when it comes to attracting prospects in social media. At the recent Dreamforce 2012 confere...
Social Media
Twitter Launches Redesign with New Header Image

September 26, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Twitter recently launched a redesign of the profile page, which includes a new header image that sits atop a user's feed stream. The image resembles Facebook’s Timeline cover image and provides merchants with a unique opportunity to showcase their brands. How to Set Up a Header Image ...
Social Media
7 Social Shopping Sites to Sell Products

September 19, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Social shopping sites can assist consumers to find products. You are likely familiar with popular sites that fit into this category — Etsy, Fab.com and Pinterest, in particular. But here are seven others that may be used by smaller retailers to list products for sale. 1. Blomming En...
Social Media
Twitter Advertising for Small Business

September 12, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Twitter offers two affordably priced advertising options for smaller businesses: "Promoted Accounts" and "Promoted Tweets." Promoted Accounts. Twitter looks at your current followers and then finds people with similar interests. When it discovers a match, Twitter recommends you in th...
Social Media
Facebook Launches Targeted Page Posts

September 4, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook continues to launch new features in an attempt to position itself as a marketing platform. The latest is targeted page posts, which enable retailers to create Facebook Page posts that reach specific audience segments. For example, if a merchant needs to market to women within...
Social Media
6 Tips for Selling Directly on Facebook

August 21, 2012 • Paul Chaney

At a time when large retailers like Gap, Nordstrom and J.C. Penney have shuttered their Facebook stores, smaller ecommerce merchants appear to be finding success. In a guest article at Forbes, Rusian Fazlyev, CEO of social-media ecommerce platform Ecwid, said that Facebook commerce is...
Social Media
Barebones Social Media Marketing

August 14, 2012 • Paul Chaney

How do you manage social media when you have little time or money? All too often that is the situation in which merchants find themselves. Faced with many demands, merchants oftentimes have little time or money to engage on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn. ...
Social Media
3 Pinterest Apps for Facebook Pages

August 7, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook and Pinterest continue to grow in popularity for social commerce marketing channels among retailers. Until recently, however, there was no convenient way to tie the two together. Two companies — Woobox and Tabfusion — have now developed easy to use apps that allow merchants to ...
Social Media
Understanding the 6 Facebook Post Types

August 1, 2012 • Paul Chaney

There are six types of posts you can make to your Facebook page: Video, Photo, Link, Question, Event, and Text. This article outlines reasons why you would use them and best practices for each post type. 1. Video Videos are among the most compelling and popular formats for Facebook p...
Social Media
10 Strategies for Effective Facebook Posts

July 23, 2012 • Paul Chaney

There are 901 million Facebook users, and the average user creates 90 pieces of content each month, according to the company. Filtering through this mountain of content to get your message seen by Fans and their friends can be difficult. Here are 10 Facebook posting strategies that ca...
Social Media
9 Ways to Increase Twitter Engagement

July 17, 2012 • Paul Chaney

A new report from social commerce company Buddy Media offers insights on how businesses can use Twitter to heighten engagement and produce favorable results. It states that to more effectively leverage Twitter as a marketing channel, businesses need to know "when to Tweet, what to Tweet...
Social Media
‘Promoted Stories’ Enables Wide Content Syndication

July 5, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Syndicating blog posts, press releases or new product announcements can be time consuming, especially when you consider the number and types of channels available. Further, many small ecommerce merchants do not have the internal resources to effectively promote such content. They may po...
Social Media
Writing Social Media Press Releases: 3 Tools to Help

June 25, 2012 • Paul Chaney

More than 3,000 press releases are issued each day. However, unless you have a public relations firm following up — making phone calls or sending emails to journalists and bloggers — it's almost impossible to get your release read by the media. But there are three ways press releases ...
Social Media
Installing Facebook’s New WordPress Plugin

June 19, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook has created a WordPress plugin that integrates the social network's functionality to a much deeper degree. It makes your WordPress site nearly an extension of Facebook itself. Once installed, each time you create a WordPress post, it automatically cross-posts to your Facebook T...
Social Media
Facebook Adds Post Scheduler and Admin Roles

June 13, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook recently added two new administrative functions to Fan pages: the ability to (a) schedule posts, and (b) set management roles for page administrators. Scheduling Posts Facebook page administrators can now schedule posts for publication at a future date. This long anticipated...
Social Media
Facebook Promoted Posts: Getting Started

June 5, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook just launched a new advertising format called Promoted Posts, which allows Page administrators to turn any Timeline post into an ad that appears at the top of Fans' news feeds. Promoted Posts increase the chance that more Fans will see it, and that more of their friends will to...

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