Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts

Thursday, 29 November 2012

eBay to give buyers real life social shopping experience

From Friday 30th November until Sunday 2nd December, eBay will be running a social media shopping experience in Covent Garden, London as they look to increase interactivity and sales on the online marketplace. 

According to some experts, Sunday December 2nd is expected to be the busiest shopping day of the year, as  many people look to get a large amount of their Christmas shopping completed well before the anticipated rush. 

The pop up store will contain large screens that will show Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts which people have placed on the social networking sites of products they have or would like to purchase. It is thought that this will give people an idea of what the more popular gift ideas are this Christmas and encourage them to also purchase these items. 

During a visit to the eBay pop up store, users will also be able to download the various eBay mobile applications on to their smartphones and scan product QR codes using a scanner on their smartphones. This ability to scan QR codes will be the most memorable aspect of the pop up store shopping experience as users will be able to view these scanned products in augmented reality, meaning they can view the products as a 3D image. 

This augmented reality could soon become a main part of eBay's shopping experience, as the online marketplace believe that this technology could bring a £2.4 billion revenue increase by 2014. 

Not the first pop up store

This isn't the first time eBay have tired the idea of running a pop up store. Earlier this month, eBay opened up a pop up store in Toronto, allowing users to browse a variety of items that eBay have placed in the store from the online marketplace place that they believe would be great holiday gifts. 

Using a QR scanner on their smartphone, users will then scan the QR code relating to the product in the ebay store, which will then open up the product on the eBay mobile app for the user to purchase online. 

These stores launched by eBay are seen as an attempt to increase the use of mobile commerce within it's users, allowing them to develop an ever increasing mobile shopping platform which the marketplace has become heavily invested in. 

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How to make the most of your social media audience



Facebook putting users phone numbers to use
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Wednesday, 28 November 2012

How to make the most of your social media audience

When running an ecommerce store, no matter what or where you sell, you are going to gain a number of customers who will become happy with your service and will become dedicated members of your various social media pages. Rather than just leaving them sitting there and occasionally posting the odd status update, how can you get these customers to engage with you to not only develop your relationship, but also improve your site to help draw more customers to your store?

Competitions

Running a competition for your ecommerce store is one of the best ways to drastically boost your social media followers and something you should look to do on a regular basis. You may run a promotion giving away a product from your store for everyone who follows your social media page, likes a particular status or retweets something you posted. People will then come flooding to your social media page in the hope of being able to pick up a freebie.

While you will be giving away some products for free, the increased followers you will see on your social media pages make this more than a worthwhile endeavour. as your social media followers grow, you will begin to see more and more people transferring from your social media pages to your store, resulting in you making back any losses from the promotion prizes, as well as a nice profit on top. 

New product ranges

One of the hardest parts about adding new product ranges is deciding which product range to implement in your store and deciding now successful each product may be with your customers. The easiest way to find this out is simply to ask them before you definitively decide to add products to the store. You may come up with 3 or 4 different product lines that you possibly want to add to your store and place them on your relevant social media pages. Your customers will then be able to give you their opinion on which products they like. This will then mean that whatever product line you add to your store, you know that there will be customers out there who will definitely be interested in purchasing what you have for sale. 

New logos and website formats

The look and layout of your website not only plays a major role on your overall brand image, it also can be a deciding factor as to whether a customer decides to purchase from you or not. Just like when deciding to add a new product range to your store, you want a logo and a website layout that will appeal to your customers so just like the new products, simply ask them. 

You could place a number of different logo designs on your social media page and then ask your customers to pick their favourite. Based on whichever logo proves to be the most popular, you can then build a new website design that incorporates not only the logo, but also the colour scheme that the logo contains.

If you have a large number of followers, another idea to increase user engagement would be to create a competition where customers could design a new logo for you, They would then submit their designs and you would pick a winner. Whichever logo won would then go on your ecommerce software and be applied to your site and as an added incentive for people to enter, you may decide to give away some products from your store as a prize. 

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Friday, 23 November 2012

Facebook putting user phone numbers to use

To personalise your social media page, Facebook have allowed you to add personal details to your profile page, such as your telephone number. These numbers are now being offered to advertisers on Facebook through their phone number retargeting initiative. 

The new advertising feature allows business, both local and global, to target someone linked to their business through a phone number via their Facebook account. To put it simply, say you have signed up for a credit card, entering all your personal details including your phone number, but then decided 6 months later you didn't want it and had the credit card cancelled. The credit card company would look into their database of everyone who signed up with them in the past, but are no longer with them any more, cross reference the phone numbers in their records with those linked to various Facebook accounts and begin placing ads on the news feeds of those individuals, advertising new credit cards or services they provide.

These advertisers can also choose to have the ad tracked, allowing them to see how successful their ads have been in getting users to convert. However, it will come as a relief of many to know that the advertisers don't actually get to see your number, they just use them for the purposes of retargeting. When a business, such as a ecommerce store, undertakes this service, the phone numbers used will be replaced with random characters by the system, making the user whose phone number it is anonymous.

If you are someone who doesn't like the idea of having a business target you with advertisements through your phone details, you should remove any records of your phone number that you have on your profile or any other pages on Facebook.

Facebook have made a rather big play towards providing a number of advertising options for businesses in recent months in order to generate some much needed revenue to improve a share price. While the share price is up to 24.32 from 21.21 at the beginning of the month, it's some way off the lofty 38.23 which the share had back in May.


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Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Is Facebook advertising just one big scam?

Facebook's recent movement towards paid promotion seemed like a great tool for an ecommerce store to help increase their public brand image, allowing them to engage with more users through their Facebook page. However, while on paper is looks like a good idea, in reality is it causing more harm than good?

Due to these paid advertisement options, Facebook have limited the true reach that your posts will achieve. When you send out a status update regarding your business such as the latest products you have, offers you are running or any questions you are putting to your customers, you would expect that everyone who is following you would be able to see the post. The truth is that only around 40% of your total followers will be able to see it. 

So, why would they do this?

 Well the answer is simple really. The less people your posts reach, the less engagement you are going to get and the more it will make you think that your Facebook posts aren't working and something needs to change. The theory is that this would then result in you using some of Facebook's paid promotion channels to increase the number of followers and engagement your business page is achieving. 

It also means that a user's news feed has a set percentage of sponsored posts visible, rather than the news feed being taken up by nearly all organic posts, strengthening Facebook's stance that promoted posts genuinely do work. 

What's the solution?

In order for you to get the maximum possible reach on your posts, meaning that everyone who follows you will be able to see what you post, you need to get your followers to click on "Like" button and then select "Add to Interests List." This will ensure that all of your followers are able to see everything that you post in the future. 

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Wednesday, 14 November 2012

How to measure social media success

Every business, whether big or small, has their own social media pages in order to increase their brand image, engage with customers and promote various goods and services that they have on offer. While everyone is doing it, how do we measure if you are doing it right?

Well, the obvious way to check how successful your social media page is would be to look at the number of total followers you have on your various accounts. The more followers you have, the more successful you are. However, you can then break that down into a number of different areas. For example, if the total number of followers gained over the last few months is less than you have seen in previous months, it is possible that you are now doing something that you weren't a few months ago which is limiting the number of followers you are gaining. 

Another way to see how effective your social media presence has been is through the number of users who have actively engaged with you. While you may have a large number of followers, having users engage with you by posting things, sending you messages or commenting on things that you post is a great way to see that not only are they interested in your ecommerce store, but are also engaged by the various content you post. 

If you primarily use Facebook as your social media platform, you can use the built in analytics system to monitor various statistical data regarding your business page. This information looks at who is following you and their demographical information such as age, location and gender as well as looking at how many people are talking about you and how many of people were exposed to your content. 

To find out what people across various social media channels are saying about your business ,whether they follow you or not, you can use websites such as Social Mention and carry out a global search. You simply enter a keyword phase such as the name of your business and the page will scour the web and bring back all posts that mention these words. This will allow you to gauge public opinion regarding your business and also allows you to see users who you could potentially engage with to encourage them to follow you. 

Klout is another great way to measure your overall social media success. Based on your engagement, reach and amplification regarding your social media posts, your account is given a Klout score of 0 to 100. The higher your score, the more social media success you are achieving. Klout links your various accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger and many others to give you one combined score. While many people doubt the relevance of Klout in determining your true social media power, it is a great way to get an overall idea of how successful you are on some platforms and which others you may need to improve.

If all else fails you can't go wrong with using Google Analytics. The free platform from Google allows you to monitor a range of webpage information and while many primarily use it in combination with their ecommerce software to see data regarding their online store, you can set it up to also record all of the information to do with your social media pages. 

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Monday, 12 November 2012

How to create a successful blog

When producing content to engage with your audience or for the purpose of improving your search engine ranking, producing fresh and entertaining content on a regular basis can often be difficult. However, whether you run an ecommerce store or another type of business, there are a number of different ways you can keep your audience engaged on a regular basis.


  • Break up your text - If a reader has to read through reams and reams of text, no matter how appealing your writing is, there are soon going to get either bored or frustrated. The best way to avoid this is to break up your text by either separating the text into paragraphs, using bullet points to make key points concise or inserting a range of different images that relate to your subject.

  • Don't waffle - Just like having clumps of text all together, taking three sentences to say something that can be summed up in one is another way to alienate your audience. Keep your writing sharp and concise, allowing your writing to be as informative as possible.

  • Offer guest bloggers - While you might produce appealing content and have a dedicated audience, having a guest write an article for your site from time to time can have a number of benefits. The obvious benefit is that you are getting fresh content without you having to actually write it. Furthermore, you are also getting a professional source with their own following to write for your site. This means that their audience will visit your site to view the content the guest blogger has produced for you, resulting in your brand image, website traffic and total blog reads taking a healthy boost.

  • Stay topical - When coming up with ideas for content, you should always be aware of what subjects are topical both in the news and in social circles. You can then look to create your own slant on this subject by relating it to something to do with your ecommerce business. This allows you to try and achieve the highest reads possible as there will be a number of people out there currently interested in that specific topic. However, this interest works both ways. There is no point writing about something that people were interested in a few months ago as they are likely no longer interested in anything relating to it. 

  • Get your audience involved - When writing a blog article, try and pose questions in your text that that makes the reader think and possibly encourages them to engage with you either through your social media pages or by commenting at the bottom of the blog post. Creating a platform for discussion at the end of your article is a great way to establish a dedicated audience and achieve a high amount of reads and shares.

  • Share your content - While you may get a few reads from your dedicated audience by just writing a blog post and then leaving it there for people to read, you need to share your content in a number of different places to give your content the best exposure possible. This means sharing your articles across Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Reddit and any other social bookmarking sites you come across. Depending on the CMS system or ecommerce software you are using to create your blog, you also want to include links to the social media pages to do with your business. That way if someone stumbles across one of your blog articles, they can visit one of your social media pages to get more information about your business.

  • Post regularly - Whether you are posting to entertain your audience or to improve your social media ranking through backlinks, it is vitally important you post on a regular basis. Just writing an article every few months isn't going to be enough to get enough backlinks to boost your ranking or to get a dedicated following. At the very least you should be producing one or two articles a week. If you have the time you may even decide to produce one every day. 

  • Link to other areas - If you are looking to produce your blog in order to help generate traffic and hopefully turn them into customers, remember to mention the services you provide within the text as well as placing links to other areas of your website.
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Thursday, 1 November 2012

Facebook testing new way to sell online

According to an article published in the US, Facebook are currently testing a new way to allow users to sell their products on the social media site, in the form of classified advertisements. 

The project, dubbed "Marketplace", will allow users to create their own advertisements on items they currently have for sale and then have them appear on their friends news feeds. While this seems to be very similar to Facebook's current promoted post feature, it is believed that the new feature may allow users to add pictures, specifications and other information a person may need when deciding to purchase a product.

How could this help a business?

When you first read what the project is looking to provide, it seems like it will be more of a tool to help causal sellers get rid of one or two items they have lying around. However, from the perspective of an ecommerce store, this could be a great way to give your more popular products a boost in sales and awareness.

With fast Christmas approaching, you may have a few products in your store that sell better than others. There are the products that you would use within this "Marketplace" feature. People who follow your business would then be exposed to these products, allowing them to either visit your ecommerce or your Facebook store in order to purchase the product or view similar products you have for sale. Not only that, the fact your product can be see by users on their news feed, they have the option to then share your product with all the friends on their friends list. This means that this feature can allow your products to be exposed to literally thousands of people within seconds, dramatically increasing the traffic and sales your store will receive.

Just like the promoted posts, this feature will require the user to pay a certain amount in order to have the classified advertisement appear on the news feeds on your followers. The exposure your products could achieve, emphasises the need for all businesses to correctly engage with their social media pages to ensure they get the highest number of followers possible. 

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Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Pinterest better than Facebook?

With an increase in interactivity, content and total users, is Pinterest becoming a better social media platform than Facebook in being able to drive customers to your ecommerce store and bring in sales?

In the UK alone, Pinterest has seen a growth in visits of 786% in the last year from 901,761 to 7,985,316. As we have said time and time again here at eSellution, for any business big and small looking to achieve online success, Pinterest is a social media platform that you must be taking advantage of and incorporate into your marketing campaign.

According to a research carried out earlier this year by jewellery and accessories retailer, Boticca.com, Pinterest is now a better social media platform at driving sales than Facebook. Figures released by the site showed that not only did Pinterest make up 10% of their online sales, compared to 7% from Facebook, the average amount spent per user was more than twice as much spent as by Facebook users.

Why is Pinterest doing so well? 

The success of Pinterest when compared to Facebook comes from in the ease in which you can have a customer engage with your products. Facebook has limitations meaning, although you can post status updates and links, if you post a number of different product images on your news feeds, your followers are only going to be able to see a maximum of 4 of these images unless they decide to open up the album and view the rest. Pinterest's board allows a business to post as many images as they like on to a board, meaning when a user views that board, they are instantly exposed to all of the product images the online store has on show. 

The fact that a user can see more products on Pinterest without having to actually click on anything, means that it is more likely you are going to interest different people in different products. This interest then encourages more people to visit the only store and thus is what is causing the higher conversion rate than Facebook.

However, although Facebook's conversion rate was lower than Pinterest in one case study, you shouldn't count out the social media giants. After celebrating reaching the 1 billion monthly users mark last month and having a number of new advertising features being integrated into the platform each day, Facebook is still is very important channel for increasing your brand image and driving traffic to your site. 

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Tuesday, 23 October 2012

A detailed guide to increasing your Christmas sales


With Christmas fast approaching in just over two months, many ecommerce stores are now gearing towards getting ready for the festive period. However, with literally thousands of online stores in the UK alone, what things can you do to help get any many sales as you can this winter?


  • Change your website layout - You might want to think about changing your website design so that it is more geared towards a Winter theme. This will not only get visiting customers in the Christmas spirit, it will let them know that you have a Winter line available for them to purchase. While you may not have a substantial amount to spend in redesigning your ecommerce store, you could use some free ecommerce and eBay templates, such as those we provide here at eSellution. Just remember to change your design back to the old version once the festive period is over. However, if creating a whole new Christmas themed website is just too much effort and too costly, you can just simply look to create a Christmas themed landing page which gives users all the information about any special festive promotions and offers you are running, then redirecting them to your current store.

  • Free delivery - Offering customers free delivery is a great way to provide them with an incentive to purchase from your store. You could offer free delivery on all sales or on total orders over a particular amount, the decision is entirely up to you. Although this would cost you more in terms of having to pay for the shipping yourself, the extra orders the promotion would bring in would make it a profitable endeavour. 

  • Delivery guaranteed before Xmas - When a customer purchases a product from you over the Winter months, 99.9% of the time they are going to want it in time for Christmas Day. If you can't guarantee delivery before Christmas, the likelihood is that the customer isn't going to be interested in purchasing from you. When a customer visits your website, if you can offer guaranteed delivery before Christmas you should state it. You should also state what the cut off date is in terms of when a customer must make a purchase to guarantee delivery before Christmas.

  • Christmas discounts - Just like free delivery, offering discounts on specific products allows you to entice customers to your store. You may decide to add a discount to your most popular products or add it to products that have not sold so well in an attempt to boost sales. Shoppers love a bargain and no matter what products are part of this discounted offer, you will see a traffic and sales increase as a result. 

  • Festive advertisements - You know you now have your Christmas range in stock, customers visiting your store know it, but what about everyone else? To keep users up to date with what's going on in your store, you should create some banners, send out emails and post content on your social media pages to give people all the information they require to bring them to your store in order to make a purchase. 

  • Generous social media offers - Anyone who follows your social media pages are doing so to keep up with any new products, offers or discounts you are currently running. Look to use this to your advantage by rewarding people who are following you and also enticing new users to also follow you. You can do this by placing a discount code on to one of your social media pages which followers can then use when making a purchase from your store. This code could be a free novelty gift, a discount off particular products, free shipping or anything else you wish to add to a service through your ecommerce software. Thus encourages people to visit your site and make a purchase, as well as encouraging new users to follow your social media page in order to find out what this discount code is.

  • Returns Policy - While there is nothing wrong with the quality of your products on sale, as some of these products are bought for people as gifts, you may find that people who receive the gift simply don't like what they have been given or want to exchange it for something else. Having a good returns policy in place will allow people to exchange products for an alternative or get money back in terms of store credit. While this is an inconvenience to you, being flexible for your customers making their experience much more pleasurable and making it more likely that they will return again to make a purchase. 

  • Monitor competitors - With so many different stores all looking to increase their Christmas sales, you should look at what your competitors are doing in terms of what products they are offering and any promotions they might be running. Keeping an eye of what they are doing, allows you to alter your own store so that what you offer is more enticing that your rivals, ensuring that customers decide to purchase from you and not from them.

  • Get your stock levels right - As a busy Christmas period will bring about an increase in traffic and sales, the last thing you want to do is miss out on many of these sales because you haven't got your stock levels right. While for most of the year you should look to make sure you don't have too much left over stock, Christmas is the time of year where you can look to over stock slightly to ensure that you have enough products to complete all orders. If after Christmas has passed you have left over stock, you simply run a New Year sale to help get rid of the leftovers. 

  • Draft in help - More orders means more work for you in being able to process these orders and get them shipped out to customers in time for Christmas. If you run your business on your own, you may have difficulty managing this influx of orders. To help get through the busy period, you can look to draft in some friends or family to give you a helping hand to complete all of your orders and get them all sent out. 

  • Christmas orientated stock - Novelty Christmas stock allows you to take advantage of those hardcore Christmas buyers. This could include small stocking fillers as presents, wrapping paper, Christmas trees and many other items. Unlike stock control for other products in your store, you don't want to over stock these novelty items. While you can still sell these at a discounted price after Xmas, the price you would need to reduce them to in order to actually get the sales would provide very little profit on top of your costs.

  • Offer a gift wrapping service - As the majority of customers will be buying these items as presents, one of the packing services you could offer is a gift wrapping service. This would involve you wrapping it in stylish wrapping paper and possibly placing a bow or customer message on the gift. This is a little extra revenue stream for you as it will only take a short amount of time to gift wrap each product and you can charge an added fee for it.
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How a Facebook store can improve all areas of your business

When setting up your ecommerce store, we understand the difficulties that sellers face in being able to stand out from the crowd, get people aware of your business and generate interest in what you have to sell. Although Facebook has seemingly ensured some hard times in the last year, the social media site stills offers a Facebook store option for all businesses to take advantage of.

However, many businesses tend to believe that this selling platform is only beneficial to large brands who have a large interest and followers on their Facebook business page. While in some regards this is true, it doesn't mean that a Facebook store can't be beneficial to smaller businesses in a number of different ways. We at eSellution provide everyone who signs up for a free ecommerce store, also with a free Facebook store as we believe having a Facebook store provides any business with a number of benefits.

First and foremost, it exposes all of your followers, whether they are customers or not, to the products you have to sell. Now, while a Facebook store may not be a fantastic selling platform, the channel compliments your ecommerce software package enormously by being a great marketing tool. Many people who follow your Facebook business page may be doing so just to see any offers or promotions you run and as they may be doing this for a number of different businesses, they would be reluctant to leave Facebook and view an external site just to browse through your store. Like I said earlier, your Facebook store allows Facebook followers to view your products without having to leave the social media site. If they do then find a product that they like the look of, they will either purchase it through the Facebook store, or this initial interest in a particular product will compel them to visit your ecommerce store and make the purchase there. 

With your products appearing within the social media site, your Facebook store also allows you to improve your brand awareness, as customers will be able to share any products they view in your Facebook store with friends linked to their account. As the link to your store is within Facebook, the friends that do receive this link will be more likely to click on it as they will see it as much more trusting than if it were just an external link. Again this is great product exposure and could result in some of these people deciding to also make a purchase as they look to gain recognition for their peers by shopping at the same place.

A Facebook store is very simple to set up and run. Like all of your ecommerce platforms we offer here at eSellution, it can all be managed through our easy to use dashboard. There is no extra worked required at all, the items that you have imported into your ecommerce store will simply be replicated into your Facebook store. 

With over a billion active monthly users and an average of around 300 friends per user, you can image how many extra people your products can be exposed to simply by having a Facebook store. 

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Monday, 22 October 2012

How to increase your social media followers

If you're someone who runs their own business page, a fan page or any other organisation page, you know that having as many followers as possible is the ultimate goal in helping increase the brand identity of your business. Whenever we have a new client joins us here at eSellution, one of the first things we do is look to ensure their social media pages are fully optimised to provide the best benefit to their ecommerce store.

Whether it's on Facebook or Twitter, there are a number of different things you can do on each platform to give yourself the best chance of gaining as many followers as you possibly can.

Facebook


Customise your page

When you set up a business page for your ecommerce store, you want to add all the information anyone visiting the page would need as soon as possible. This means placing your business logo as your display picture and adding all other information such as what your business is, how long you have been in business and any other contact information such as URL, telephone number and email address. This information should be added before you starting posting content on your wall or invite people to follow your page.

Invite your friends

The easiest way to get the ball rolling is to ask all of your friends to follow your business page. Once they become a fan of your page, the notification will appear on the news feed of all their friends, allowing them to also see your business and possibly follow you. This is the easiest way to create that initial brand awareness and get as many people as possible becoming aware of your ecommerce store.  

Welcome message

Something you can look to do as an added personalised touch for each of your followers, is to send them a thank you message and welcome them to your business page. While this may be more difficult to do the more followers you generate long term, for the initial stages on your social media page, this allows each of your followers to gain a personalised experience on your business page, ensuring they feel valued right from the start. 

Vary your content

While you want to post content on your wall on a regular basis, the success of your Facebook page comes in being able to post a variety of content. The great thing about Facebook is that you can post pretty much any content you like. This means you can post regular status updates, links to your website, pictures, videos, articles like I said, pretty much anything you want. The more varied content you post, the more chance you have of not only engaging with your current followers, but enticing new users to follow your page.

Time you post

Although you will get engagement from some of your followers no matter what time during the day you post content, there are statistically times during the day where engagement levels will be higher than others. To optimise your engagement levels, you should look to post your content either on the morning, during lunch hours or during the evening, as these are the times when the higher proportion of users will check their social media accounts. 

Open a Facebook store

 While having a Facebook store on your page won't drastically increase your sales, it is a great marketing tool to make people on your Facebook business page aware of the products you sell without them actually having to leave the social media site. This works by placing a "My Store" tab on their business page which a user can click on and view your products. If a customer finds a product on your Facebook store that they are interested in, they can choose to their make the purchase through Facebook or visit your external ecommerce or eBay store to do it. If you have yet to set up a Facebook store, you can get a Free Facebook store from us today


Twitter


 Customise your page

 Like Facebook, as soon as you have created your Twitter business page, you need to update all of your information so that anyone visiting your profile knows who you are and what you offer within seconds. On top of that, you should also provide an external link to your business.

Follow as many people as you can

 As soon as you have everything set up, you should begin following as many people as possible. However, by this I don't mean simply follow anyone and everyone. As your profile is a business and not a personal account, you should only follow important figures in your field of interest. Following these people will allow more people to become aware of your Twitter page and if you post content that people find interesting, then some of these people will also decide to follow you.

Start Tweeting

 Unlike Facebook, there are certain limitations on what you can Tweet. Generally, you should be looking to only post status updates, pictures and external links for people to access. These external links can be to your online store, your latest promotions or any articles you may have produced.

Avoid personalised Tweets

 Again, as this isn't a personal Twitter account, no one following your business page wants to know what you are doing, where you are going or what you had for your lunch. Anything you post on your Twitter page should be only aimed at helping improve your business's image and generating sales.

Interact with people

 The great thing about Twitter comes in the ease in which you can interact with anyone; friends, family, customers or even leading figures in your industry. This communication is an integral part of not only improving your brand image, but making your business seem more personalised and more of an important figure within your industry. You may even try to reach out to one of these leading figures in order to get them to retweet one of your posts or engage with something you say. Although, due to the amount of people who try to engage with them on a daily basis, you may find that your Tweet receives no response.

Retweet

 While it's important to get your own tweets out there, it's also a good idea to retweet other peoples Tweets. This come be done for a number of different reasons; you find something interesting that someone else has posted and you want to share it with your followers or you simply want to give someone a helping hand by making as many people as possible aware of someone's post. The long term success of this is that, when you post content, you may find that some of these individuals decide to return the favour and retweet your content to their followers.


Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html



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Friday, 5 October 2012

Mobile Commerce - eBay and Facebook can't be wrong

According to statistics produced by online marketplace eBay, every second someone purchases from an ecommerce store on their mobile within the UK. Also, separate figures published yesterday by social media giants Facebook, state that, out of the 1 billion regular monthly users they have, over 600 million of them access the site through their mobile devices. This begs the question that if you have yet to consider mobile users when running your online store, what are you doing?

When you combine the fact that nearly all adults in the UK own a mobile device, with around 50% of those being smartphones and, that the hectic schedules of people mean they no longer have the time to sit at a computer and carry out their shopping from a desktop, many users are now opting to carry out their retail therapy either while on the go or from the comfort of their living room sofa by purchasing from an online store through their mobile devices. According to figures produced by the IMRG Capgermini Quarterly Index, within the next three months, mobile devices will account for around 20% of total online sales.

However, this doesn't just mean you should sit back and think 'Great, people will be visiting my store on their phones and making more purchases.' While this is true for some stores, if you don't have a user friendly mobile store, you will struggle to even get a small fraction of this projected 20%. When a customer tries to make a purchase on their phone, they are usually on the move and using a much smaller screen than in comparison to say a computer screen. If your store displays on a mobile just like it would on a desktop computer, it is going to be difficult for customers to navigate around your site, having to constantly zoom in and scroll around the page to find what they are looking for. This added time and effort makes the whole process much more difficult, most likely resulting in the user growing frustrated and leaving your store to go elsewhere. 

When looking to capitalise on this growing sales platform, it is paramount that you have your online store set up to be mobile friendly. This means that when a user visits your store on their mobile device, they will view a different layout than they would see on a desktop computer. There will be less pages to navigate through, buttons will be bigger and easier to click as well as the whole checkout process being much shorter. The quicker you can have a user go through the process and purchase from the store, the happier the customer is going to be and the more sales you are going to be able to make over a shorter period of time. 

Still need more convincing about the importance of mobile commerce?

This argument is bolstered by the development of mobile phone apps such as eBay's RedLaser app that allows you to find products within a bricks and mortar store and then search online to see if you can find them cheaper. If one your store is one of the stores a user comes across in these search results and it isn't easier for them to navigate around, like I said earlier, they are just going to leave your store and go elsewhere. In addition to the earlier statistics produced by eBay, the online marketplace stated that they have had over 100 million downloads of their mobile application as well as over 100 million products listed on various eBay stores via mobile devices. To put that into some sort of perspective, $275 is spent on average each second through eBay mobile. While this is across all eBay stores, a small fraction of this could make the difference whether your store is a success or failure. 

If you are looking to expand your ecommerce store or haven't fully explored the benefits mobile commerce can bring to your business, I strongly advise you taking a look at our free ecommerce store that allows you to set up an ecommerce store integrated with eBay that also provides you with a Facebook and mobile store all without you having to pay any costs whatsoever. Once you create your free account with eSellution you will be able to set your layout, add your products and literally begin selling in minutes. With under three months to go until Christmas, you can't afford to miss out on the significant amount of sales that the festive period brings because you have an online store that is not efficient for mobile devices. 

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Why 1 billion Facebook users is good for us all...

Yesterday, Facebook announced that they had finally reached the one billion mark of users who were actively logging into their accounts each month. Looking at it globally, that's around a massive 1 in every 7 people on the face of the planet logging into the social media site.

Although the majority of these users use the social media site to interact with friends, post status updates and add photos, within Q2 , around 84% of the site's revenue was generated from advertising and with the number of new advertising features that have recently been added, this figure is set to increase in the coming months and years.

While you may only be able to reach a small percentage of these people, a small percentage of 1 billion is still a significant number and having your brand exposed across this platform is a great way to not only make people aware of your online store, but also increase the number of sales you can achieve, helping your business become a greater success.

In recent months, the public troubles Facebook have faced in terms of their falling share price and waning customer satisfaction, many people have questioned the sites future and it's ability to truly help any business. However, the recent introduction of added marketing platforms within the site, serves as a great way to help give your ecommerce store that much needed boost in brand awareness.  

The truth is while people are growing annoyed with the new timeline feature and the new advertising additions, many users both store owners and customers need Facebook to still be a huge social media platform. For startup businesses that doesn't have much to spend on advertising and marketing, having a free social media platform with 1 billion users to target is invaluable, making the difference between whether your business gets of the ground or struggles to do anything at all. 

From the perspective of the consumer, the more users actively getting involved with Facebook each month, the more resources brands are going to put into making the social media platform a success. This means customers will be exposed to more stores and come across more great value prices as well as find out about the various offers that are running across different stores. In terms of business promotion, Facebook is a win-win situation for both buyers and sellers alike. 

While everyone knows that in order to achieve either social media or social commerce success within Facebook, you must first create your own business page. However, in terms of self promotion, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook also boosts a number of different added marketing channels to advertise your business such as promoting your ads so that they appear at the top of the search bar and or within users newsfeeds, having users share your relevant pages with their friends and having any articles or content you produced appear within the trending articles feature on users newsfeed page. 

Although some of these added marketing features require you to actually pay from them, as opposed to only having a business page that allows you to post status updates and content for free, these added features allow you to advertise your brand beyond the people who follow your business page or are people who are friends of people who do. The features allow you to reach people who you may have struggled to reach through other methods and while these definitely aren't for everyone, they are just things you should consider when running your online business. 

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Wednesday, 3 October 2012

eBay thinking pink this October

As this month is National Breast Cancer Awareness month, eBay are looking to help increase this awareness by giving sellers and buyers the ability to pledge a donation to help get involved. 

If you would like to play your part and have your eBay store participate in this initiative throughout October, you can choose to pledge a percentage of each of your sales to non profit organisations such as Bright Pink and the Avon Foundation. The minimum percentage must be 10% or more but there is no maximum limit. If you are feeling incredibly generous this month, you can look to give 100% of all your sales to charity. If you do decide to give away a certain percentage of your sale, eBay will refund the insertion as listing fee up to that specific percentage. So for example, if you decide to give away 10% of your sale, eBay will refund 10% of your insertion and final value fee

However, giving away a percentage of your sales is just a little more than you can afford to give, you can still look to make a contribution by pledging a specific amount as a donation through the eBay Giving Works section. 

You can also look to get involved with the charity drive through eBay's Facebook page, allowing you to carry out a number of different actions to help play your part. Every act you carry out will result in a $1 donation being given to eBay's non-profit partners up to a total of $20,000.

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