Social Media
Our social media marketing coverage addresses management tools, educational courses, platform tips, social analytics, and strategies for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. We’ve interviewed merchants who rely on social media traffic, and vendors who provide specialized services.
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Social Media
Pinterest Releases Business Accounts
November 19, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest, the popular image and video sharing site, now allows for specific business accounts that have a separate set of terms and conditions and may eventually include promotional options not currently available on the platform. "Thousands of businesses have become part of our commu...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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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. ...
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Social Media
YouTube’s Time Watched Algorithm Update
October 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
In the past, YouTube measured a video’s popularity based on the number of clicks it received. Last Friday the video search giant changed its algorithm — here's the blog post at YouTube — to take the time spent watching a video into account. As a result, ecommerce sites wanting to attrac...
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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...
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Social Media
Is Pinterest the Best Social Platform for Ecommerce?
October 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest may owe its popularity to human nature. Early this year, Monetate, the shopping-personalization firm, made headlines when it pronounced that Pinterest was reshaping social commerce and could be a leading source of social media traffic to online retail sites. And even if the M...
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Social Media
17 Social Media Cheat Sheets
October 15, 2012 • Sig Ueland
These days, small businesses use a variety of social media sites in their marketing efforts. Cheat sheets are a helpful way to keep the functionality of each site straight. Here is a list of cheat sheets for the major social media sites. There are infographic tools to identify keyboard...
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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 ...
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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...
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Social Media
A Social Media Marketing Paradox?
October 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A new study finds that social media influences just one percent of ecommerce transactions, meaning that thousands of merchants could be, potentially, wasting valuable marketing dollars. But consumers and small and mid-sized retailers are claiming social success. Is there a social media ...
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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 ...
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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...
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Social Media
Top 20 Viral Marketing Videos
September 18, 2012 • Sig Ueland
If you want to find brand videos having an impact, follow what's being shared. Here is a list of the top 20 shared marketing videos over the last thirty days. Included in this list are non-profit organizations, political campaign videos, and an education documentary. This information...
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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...
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Social Media
Google+ For Business Now in Apps
September 11, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Recently Google released a set of Google+ features that encourage collaboration within an enterprise. These new features will be available to the company's current Google Apps for Business customers on a trail basis at least through the end of 2013. The Google Apps for Business suite i...
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Social Media
10 Brand Campaigns on Twitter
September 5, 2012 • Sig Ueland
Twitter is about what’s happening right now. For companies, Twitter can be an effective platform to reach and to interact with an audience. Here is a list of brand campaigns on Twitter. Some of these campaigns use Twitter to deliver rewards to customers. Other campaigns use Twitter to ...
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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...
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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...
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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. ...
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Social Media
34 People to Follow on Google+
August 14, 2012 • Sig Ueland
Google+ is one year old. While the social network has not achieved the critical mass of Facebook or Twitter, Google+ hosts a large and engaged community that includes entrepreneurial giants, tech visionaries and social media super-stars. Here is a list of people to follow on Google+. E...
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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 ...
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Social Media
5 Tips for Pinterest Pin-to-Win Contests
August 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest is the most important new social sharing site in 2012, giving online marketers both a new way to engage potential customers and a means of boosting sales. Although there have been conflicting reports of just how Pinterest is impacting business fundamentals like sales, the gen...
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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...
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Social Media
7 Tips for Pinterest Pinning
July 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Social sharing site Pinterest has grown to 12 million users and sparked a new surge in social marketing. Some online businesses are hoping to use Pinterest as a way to engage customers and make sales. As with any form of marketing there are some best practices that may make a business'...
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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...
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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...
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Social Media
14 Pinterest-Like Sites for Product Promotion
July 9, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Popular photography and video tagging site Pinterest and its many clones have sparked a product-photo sharing frenzy that may present a good marketing opportunity for retailers. Pinterest and similar sites allow users to “pin,” “fancy,” “tag,” and “tap” images and videos in a manner ve...
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