Every Tuesday, the Volusion team will be posting quick educational videos to help you further succeed online. Today’s episode teaches you some basic ways to better integrate your ecommerce site with social media efforts.
Happy Tuesday! Hope you’re having a great build-up before the Labor Day holiday here in the US. Since you’re already online finalizing […]
Original post by Matt
Every Tuesday, the Volusion team will be posting quick educational videos to help you further succeed online. Today’s episode teaches you some basic ways to better integrate your ecommerce site with social media efforts.
Happy Tuesday! Hope you’re having a great build-up before the Labor Day holiday here in the US. Since you’re already online finalizing […]
Original post by Matt
When building a social media strategy, it’s important to utilize your most loyal followers to build your overall social media presence. By identifying these loyalists, categorizing them, and reaching out for favors, your business can foster mutually beneficial relationships for social media gains.
One thing that is often forgotten when implementing a social media strategy is […]
Original post by Matt
Adding fuel to the fire that “Facebook Privacy” is an oxymoron, a tool built with Facebook’s own API lets you search Facebook status updates. Though Openbook is intended for entertainment purposes and public awareness about the insecurity of your Facebook information, it can also be used as a social media monitoring tool for businesses.
I ran through a few searches for top online retailers and found Facebookers are quite chatty about companies. For example, Office Depot and Newegg:
I was surprised at how many Facebookers were updating their statuses with their shopping experiences, positive and negative.
A recent survey by Morpace, Facebook’s Impact on Retailers (PDF) reveals that consumers do like to evangelize products and businesses with their friends on Facebook. The study found 68% of Facebook users would be more likely to try a product or visit a retailer when a friend has made a positive recommendation.
I spotted a few Facebookers sharing Diapers.com promo codes in their Facebook statuses. I’m not sure if these are affiliates or if Diapers.com is doing a customer campaign – but asking customer to share coupon codes is a good idea, given that recommendations from friends carry so much influence. Retailers with loyalty programs may be able to offer kickbacks to customers based on how much business they refer.
They may have more influence on customers than affiliates, and offering credits toward future purchases rather than commissions to affiliates may also be more profitable.
Other creative ways you can encourage your customers to “share the love” about your company or products is ask them to post links to their wish list/registry, “Like” your products or join your Fan Page. The Morpace study found that the average Facebook user is a fan of 9 Pages, and the number one reason for joining Fan Pages is to let friends know what products they support.
Did you know Get Elastic just launched a Fan Page?
Like monitoring Twitter and other mentions of your company on the web (through services like Google Alerts), you should be keeping tabs on what folks are saying in Facebook as part of your social media monitoring efforts. You can use this information to identify problems with your service, gauge customer sentiment about your brand, develop customer personas and measure the success of social media marketing campaigns (like “share this coupon with friends”).
Hat tip to Marketing Pilgrim for noticing Openbook
Original post by Linda Bustos
ZippyCart.com is a leading comparison site for top ecommerce solutions like Volusion. As a non-bias review site, they have gained the trust of many merchants in search of a shopping cart solution to power their online businesses. This week is Volusion Week on ZippyCart, and as part of our week long celebration of […]
Original post by Matt
If your ecommerce site has (or is thinking of adding) user generated content (UGC) like product reviews, questions and answers, forums, knowledge bases, photos, video, blogs, comments and social tags, here are 9 things to keep in mind:
1. What’s Right for You?
Just because Amazon is doing user-submitted video and photos or product tagging doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. It’s important to consider what makes sense for the types of products you’re selling, your customer behavior and even sales volume. If Amazon’s ratio of purchases to traditional product reviews (slide 31) is 1,300 to 1, imagine how high it would be for video and photo, which take a lot more time and computer savvy from customers than text reviews.
2. “Everything in Moderation”
To protect your brand integrity, you really do have to moderate everything – whether product reviews, video, photos or comments. Make sure you have the resources and processes to moderate in a timely manner.
3. Privacy
Customers want to have confidence that you respect their privacy as an aggregator of their contributed content.
4. Content Ownership
Think carefully whether you or your customer owns content. Keep in mind some third party platforms like customer reviews and even web analytics may actually own contributed content. You may not be able to take it with you if you switch platforms, so make sure you own the content when choosing a vendor.
5. Storage
User generated content may “live” in your CMS, custom database or in variety of third party, hosted applications. Whenever possible, consolidate this content so it’s easy to access in one place.
6. In-site Search
User generated content is ideally indexed by your site search tool to appear in search results. If data exists in multiple places, this becomes more difficult. Sophisticated systems may use federated search to solve the problem.
7. SEO and Indexing
The major search engines realize the value that videos, images and reviews deliver to searchers. Google has even partnered with Bazaarvoice recently to deliver product reviews in search snippets.
Fresher content may also give your page a boost in search engines, as will more content (more text means more opportunities your page text will match a search query. Also, customers will use synonyms and misspellings that you don’t use in your product copy. But you can’t benefit from UGC unless search engines index it. Avoid using Javascript or frames to deliver content (common practice with third party platforms), as search engines will ignore it.
8. Syndication and Extended Usage
Consider whether you want your content syndicated to other sites like shopping engines and review aggregators. The benefit might be more reach, but at the expense of search engine traffic (duplicate text on multiple sites, the aggregator may rank higher because of higher trust in search engines, more links, etc).
On the flip side, you may decide to aggregate content from external sites on your page like reviews, blog posts, images and even Youtube video. Quality control and moderation are important if you go this route.
9. Profile Integration and Upload Process
It’s important the customer only need to log in once to upload content for a seamless experience.
10. Platform vs. Build In House
Because of the considerations above, you may decide an in-house build better meets your requirements for control, integration or innovation.
These tips are taken from our latest webinar: Managing online content across markets and channels: The role of PIM and CMS in ecommerce (PIM stands for Product Information Management, and CMS stands for Content Management System) with Elastic Path’s Peter Sheldon. If you missed it, you can watch the replay on-demand or peruse the slide deck below:
Original post by Linda Bustos
For ecommerce, reaching out to customers is key to increase sales – but do we interact with them using old media or new media? Here, we discuss the differences between the two and how both can, and should, be used to bring traffic to your online store.
Old media (also known as traditional media) is a […]
Original post by Matt
Related articles:Because September and October are historically times when many people open their first business, this week is dedicated to topics surrounding starting your own business. While this is not an end-all-be-all list of steps you must take, they’ll help you get a solid head start on your new business venture. Thank you for joining us […]
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Original post by Celeste LeCompte
How do you improve the world if you worked at a charity? Well, in the old days you would do a lot of work just to meet people. You’d use direct mail. You’d hire phone banks of people to call and bug other people during dinner (we get those calls all the time). You’d go to conferences where rich people hang out (I meet charities all the time at Davos and other conferences). You’d work with HR directors at companies to build projects (the United Way did that with Microsoft, for instance).
But there has got to be a better way to raise attention on issues and get people to donate, isn’t there?
Yes, and we’ve seen this new way used quite a few times on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.
Now there’s a web site, Socialbrite, that covers how you can improve the world with social media. Started by JD Lasica, it’s an attractive site that tracks, and helps, people and causes who are using social networks to change the world. It’s worth spending some of your attention on.
Original post by Robert Scoble
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Original post by Robert Scoble
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Original post by Robert Scoble
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Original post by Robert Scoble
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