Tracey Wallace
The world of ecommerce is ever-changing and even the seasoned ecommerce professional can get overwhelmed with the amount of detail. Between managing your site to ensure proper inventory flow, to optimizing every page for conversion via A/B testing, there’s a lot to do to reap the benefits of all the internet has to offer including SEO, social media and inbound marketing.
Don’t worry, though. To help out all ecommerce professionals, from those just starting their own store, to those managing a site for a legacy brand, we’re dedicating a weekly post to making sure you’ve got your I’s dotted and T’s crossed when it comes to running an online business.
This week, we’ll be covering how to get started selling on social media, specifically on Facebook and Twitter. In all, U.S. social commerce is expected to breach 14 billion in sales in 2015, accounting for a full 5% of all online store revenue –– and you absolutely want your business to be a part of that cash flow.
So, let’s get started. Here’s how you open up shop on social.
Creating A Facebook Page For Your Business
Okay, Facebook. You’ve heard of it, but you may not know how effective it can be for your business. More than one billion people use Facebook. And more than 3.2 billion Facebook “likes” and comments occur daily.
By having a strong Facebook presence, your business can be part of these conversations and benefit from the most powerful form of marketing – word of mouth, or in this case, word of “post” marketing.
In this lesson you will learn:
- How having Facebook page can positively affect your business.
- How to create a Facebook page for your business.
- How to promote your business using Facebook.
Selling On Facebook With Social Shop
Bigcommerce has built you a free, one-of-a-kind application called Social Shop. This app enables you to set up a fully functional Facebook Shop. That’s right! Your fans can easily browse, buy and share products, all without ever leaving Facebook. This application gives you more opportunity to gain momentum around your business and also, of course, increase your sales.
In this lesson you will learn:
- How to use the Bigcommerce Social Shop App.
- Tips and tricks to start selling on Facebook.
Getting Started On Twitter
Twitter is a social network that is similar to having a continuous and up-to-date supply of newspaper headlines. However, instead of calling them head lines your posts are cleverly referred to as “tweets.” These tweets are 140 characters and can be cram packed marketing goodness. That means, when it comes to running a business you should absolutely try to harness the power of Twitter.
In this lesson you will learn:
- How Twitter works.
- Why you want to use Twitter to market your business.
- How to setup a Twitter account.
Marketing Your Business With Twitter
So how do you make 140 characters powerful? How do you get followers? Where the heck do you start!?
Number one, figure out the unique personality of your store. Search for other people interested in the same things and take a look at what they are sharing and how they structure their posts. You can get some great tips this way. Don’t forget to take a look at what your competitors are doing well, and maybe — not so well. Then you can start retweet what you find relevant and interesting. “Retweeting” means you are sharing someone else’s post on your own page.
In this lesson you will learn:
- Twitter basics.
- How to use twitter to market to your customers.
- Tips to build a Twitter following.
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