Social Media Archives

How to Use Facebook’s Photo Strip; 7 Examples

June 1, 2011 • Paul Chaney

When Facebook added the photo strip to the Wall on Fan pages, it left page owners and administrators wondering just how to make use of the new feature. Not only that, the Fan page version lacked one attribute present in the personal profile version: the ability to arrange photos in a ...

Social Media

Facebook’s 10 Social Plugins; Benefits to Merchants

May 31, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Facebook social plugins are a quick and easy way to extend your social reach and engage your website’s visitors with social interaction. The Facebook social plugins are easily installed. On each plugin’s page — noted below — in the Facebook Developers section, the configuration tool le...

Social Media

7 Ways to Build a Brand Using Blogs

May 25, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Branding is more than just a business buzzword. It has become the crux of selling in the new economy. If the old marketing mantra was “Nothing happens until somebody sells something,” the new philosophy could be “Nothing happens until somebody brands something.” If you are not currentl...

Social Media

Facebook’s New ‘Send’ Button: How to Use, Install, Benefit

May 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook's new "Send" button functions similarly to a "Forward to a Friend" plug-in that you often see in broadcast emails. The difference is, in addition to sending a message to any email address, users can select specific Facebook friends to notify, and send the message as a post to F...

Social Media

Managing Negative Facebook Page Comments

May 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

A small business owner contacted me recently. She had received a comment on her Facebook page criticizing the price of her products. In her way of thinking, it would be better to have no comments at all than to give disgruntled customers the opportunity to use her Fan page as a platform...

Social Media

Top 51 Facebook Pages with Stores

May 12, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Facebook commerce is here. But what is sold on Facebook, and how it is sold, is still up in the air. Here is a list of the 51 most popular — based on the number of "Likes" — Facebook pages with stores. For the purposes of this article, a page is considered to have a “store” if there ar...

Social Media

5 Ways to Increase Ratings and Reviews

May 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Today's Internet is largely driven by peer-to-peer interaction. When making a purchase, consumers seek out the experiences of others. This includes reading online ratings and reviews posted by other consumers, which can increase overall engagement and drive sales. With that in mind, he...

Social Media

5 Ways Merchants Can Locate Social Communities

May 6, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: One of the marketing challenges faced by ecommerce merchants is finding online communities that have an interest in the merchants' products. Few observers dispute the potential of social media, provided merchants can find interested parties to be social with. We posed th...

Social Media

16 Facebook Marketing Strategies

May 3, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are thousands of Facebook apps, including a growing class designed for marketing use on company Facebook Pages. Here is a list of 16 different marketing strategies — using apps — that can help your ecommerce business. 1. Facebook Send button Facebook recently launched the “Send”...

Social Media

Have You Reddit? Surging Social-News Site Can Help Merchants

May 2, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Reddit is a social media site that allows anyone to submit links to news articles, blog posts, pictures, or other web content. Once submitted, Reddit users vote content up or down, potentially driving hundreds or even thousands of clicks and visitors. Reddit has been around since 2005,...

Social Media

Sprout Social: Social Media Management Time-Saving Tool

April 26, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are a number of tools that help reduce the time required to manage social media engagement. We have reviewed many of them here, in "15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity" and "5 Time-Saving Social Network Tools." In this article, I want to review a resource that I have ...

Social Media

8 Benefits to Facebook ‘Likes’

April 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Last week, I addressed strategies for increasing numbers of Facebook Likes, in "15 Ways to Get Liked on Facebook." This week, I discuss 8 reasons why getting Likes can benefit your business, and I cite research that attempts to assign a value to each "Like." 8 Reasons to Encourage Like...

Social Media

15 Ways to Get ‘Liked’ on Facebook

April 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Once a business has established a Facebook Page, a key challenge is to grow its fan base. This is accomplished, in part, through the use of the "Like" button. By clicking the Like button, a person expresses affinity for the brand or its products. It is the Facebook equivalent of an emai...

Social Media

Social Q&A: New Take On An Old Genre

April 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

The question-and-answer genre has been around for a long time in the form of bulletin boards, discussion forums and sites such as Answers.com and AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com). A new variation ...

Social Media

10 Marketers You Must Follow on Twitter

April 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Changing consumer behaviors are having a significant effect on marketing tactics and strategies. New social sites, mobile devices, or other advancements are fueling these changes. Just a few years ago no mainstream marketers had budgets for Facebook ads. But now Facebook is a leading o...

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Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts; 8 Suggestions

March 29, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Google’s so-called “Farmer” algorithm update emphasizes original, unique content for favorable organic search results. Frequently-updated, keyword-optimized, topically-relevant blog posts can provide your ecommerce site with original content, and improve its search engine rankings. I have seen it happen

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3 YouTube Advertising Options for Small Businesses

March 21, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Online video has gone mainstream. Thanks to sites like Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, more people are watching full-length movies and TV shows online than ever before. But no site has the video audience of YouTube. Consider these facts, which are from YouTube's Statistics page: M...

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3 Tools to Create New Facebook iFrame Pages

March 14, 2011 • Paul Chaney

March 10 was a big day for Facebook Page owners. On that day, Facebook upgraded Pages to a new layout and removed FBML — Facebook Markup Language — as the custom-tab-creation code, replacing it with iframes. The latter action spelled trouble for do-it-yourselfers because it required the...

Social Media

10 Tips for Marketing on Redesigned Facebook

March 7, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Now that Facebook has made a number of changes to its platform, such as the new design, new layout and the use of iframes to create custom tabs, an updated list of Facebook marketing tips could be helpful. This follows from my three-part explanatory series of those changes, at: "Part...

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How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 3: Sponsored Stories Ad Units

February 28, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: This is "Part 3" of a three-part series describing the recent changes Facebook made to its platform, and how those changes affect smaller companies. The series has ran in the following order. Part 1: Page Redesign Part 2: From FBML to iFrames In this "Part 3" instal...

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How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 2: From FBML to iFrames

February 22, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. In response, Practical eCommerce will publish "How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants," a three-part series aimed at addressing each of these changes. T...

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How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 1: Page Redesign

February 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. First, Facebook implemented a planned redesign of business-oriented "Pages" (also called "fan pages" or "business pages") to mirror the way personal Profiles — for individuals ...

Social Media

5 Social-Shopping Sites to Help Retailers, Consumers

February 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney

I received an email recently from a friend asking me what type of vacuum cleaner he should purchase. I noticed the email did not come from him directly, however, but from ShopSocially, a social shopping website that is part of a new class of sites in which reliance on friends is at the ...

Social Media

The Basics of Advertising on Facebook

January 31, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook commerce has a long way to go before it's on par with traditional ecommerce. But many ecommerce merchants report that Facebook Ads, a self-service, pay-per-click advertising platform similar to Google AdWords, generates positive returns. In this article, I am going to outline t...

Social Media

Tools to Build a Strong Twitter Following; Relevance Is Key

January 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Twitter is helpful for many small businesses. One key to maximizing its value is to find relevant people to follow in the hopes they will return the courtesy. Relevance is essential to growing a follower base that would most likely read your content, and eventually become customers. I w...

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Designing for the New Twitter Layout

January 17, 2011 • Paul Chaney

It won't be long before everyone is subject to the new, wider Twitter layout. Up to now, the new layout has been optional and Twitter users could switch back to the old settings. Though no firm date has been announced for the transition, Twitter indicates it will take place soon. Here's...

Social Media

4 Realities of Selling on Facebook

January 11, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are few who question Facebook's potential for ecommerce merchants. Access to a user base of nearly 600 million consumers — coupled with the targeting of specific audience segments based on users' Likes — are compelling reasons to experiment with it as a sales channel. However, li...

Social Media

Facebook Insights Helps Measure Social Media Efforts

January 10, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Social media marketing can be an effective way to engage customers and, ultimately, sell more products. There have certainly been lots of articles, publications, and webinars that describe tactics you can use in social media campaigns. But there may be comparatively few resources that h...

Social Media

9 Twitter Productivity Tools

January 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Many people consider Twitter an enormous waste of time. "Why would I care what someone had for dinner?" is a question often asked by those who do not use Twitter for personal communications. Granted, if improperly managed, Twitter can be a huge black hole sucking up lots of time. What...

Social Media

How to Rescue Posts from Facebook’s Spam Filter

January 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

In October 2010, Facebook introduced automatic content filtering to business pages (sometimes called Fan pages) in an effort to help stop Wall spammers from successfully posting unwanted or dangerous messages to dozens or even hundreds of pages daily. For social media marketers, the fi...