Category

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.

Social Media
8 Instagram Photo-Sharing Alternatives

January 8, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Photo-sharing site Instagram created a controversy recently when it proposed a change in its terms of service that would have allowed the company to incorporate user generated images in ads without users' permission. The company has since reconsidered its decision. Having written "10 W...
Social Media
Using Instagram for your Ecommerce Business

January 2, 2013 • Paul Chaney

Popular photo-sharing app Instagram — which Facebook acquired earlier this year — is now used by businesses. Of 100 leading brands, 54 have incorporated Instagram, according to Simply Measured, an analytics firm. Here is how you can start using Instagram to market your products and ser...
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
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...
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
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...
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
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...
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...
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
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 ...
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
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...
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
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...
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 ...
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...

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