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.
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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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Social Media
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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Social Media
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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Social Media
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...
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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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Social Media
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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Social Media
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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Social Media
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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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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Social Media
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Social Media
Social Commerce Top 10 for 2010; Outlook for 2011
December 29, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Two social commerce topics that created the biggest stir this year were location-based social networks like Foursquare and Facebook Places, and group coupon deals championed by sites like Groupon and Living Social. Groupon became the year's leading social commerce newsmaker when it repo...
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Social Media
The 12 Ways of Facebook Commerce
December 21, 2010 • Paul Chaney
One of the most-loved songs associated with the yuletide season is "The Twelve Days of Christmas." In an effort to pay homage to the song and the season, here are 12 ways to market your ecommerce business using Facebook, during Christmastime or at anytime. 1. Create a Facebook Page C...
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Social Media
10 Free Facebooks Apps for Ecommmerce Merchants
December 13, 2010 • Paul Chaney
The best things in life are free. Or so The Beatles sang, in Money. Here is a list of ten free Facebook apps that I recommend for ecommerce businesses. I've divided them into four categories: Landing Page Creation, Email Marketing, Facebook Shopping Carts, and Other. Landing Page Crea...
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Social Media
Amplify.com Combines Blogging, Social Networking, News Clipping
December 9, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Blogging is popular among social media users. But many small businesses still do not use it for marketing. Most lack either the time or commitment required to make blogging a successful marketing strategy. But there is a now a way to incorporate blogging that doesn't require the same d...
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Social Media
Social Media’s Effect on Holiday Sales
December 2, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Ecommerce is playing an increasingly important role in holiday sales. But how much of that growth can be attributed to social media? I asked Hitwise, the competitive intelligence service, how much traffic ecommerce sites received from social media. A spokesman for Hitwise responded vi...
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Social Media
Facebook Requests Home Page Status; Effect on Ecommerce Merchants
November 24, 2010 • Paul Chaney
When people log onto the Internet, they tend to go one of three places: Google, their email inboxes or, increasingly, Facebook. Now, Facebook is reportedly positioning itself to become the home page for its users. According to articles in TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal, Facebook...
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Social Media
LinkedIn’s New ‘Company Pages’ Showcase Products, Recommendations
November 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney
LinkedIn has released a new version of its company profiles called "Company Pages," which provides a place for businesses to "showcase their products, services and associated recommendations," according to LinkedIn. Heretofore, LinkedIn company profiles served only a research purpose ...
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Social Media
New Firefox Extension: Social Marketing While You Browse
November 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Mozilla Labs Messaging Group has released a new Firefox extension that makes it simpler to share content from around the web on Facebook and Twitter. Social media marketing seeks to make new or more loyal customers by engaging with them, not just pushing products. Usually, social marke...
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Social Media
3 Group Coupon Companies for Purely Online Merchants
November 15, 2010 • Paul Chaney
A lot of activity is occurring around the group-coupon-deals space in recent days. Facebook launched "Deals," which, according to Facebook, "local businesses will be able to offer you deals when you check in to their place on Facebook." And there's Groupon Stores, which allow merchants ...
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Social Media
8 Steps to Social Media Success
November 9, 2010 • Paul Chaney
"How do I get started?" is a question I often hear regarding social media marketing. In this article, I provide eight steps to help. Think of it as a checklist of must-do items that will put you in the best position to integrate social media into your overall marketing mix and take adva...
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Social Media
7 Blog Platforms for 3 Methods of Blogging
November 1, 2010 • Paul Chaney
The last time I compared blog platforms on Practical Ecommerce was in 2005. In "Blog Platforms: Choose One that Fits Your Need," I reviewed four of the most used at that time: Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, and WordPress. While those are still popular, others have since appeared. Over...
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Social Media
Tips for an Effective Twitter Profile
October 27, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Twitter can help ecommerce merchants. It provides a conduit to connect with their customers and communicate with prospects. Merchants should be careful, however, when using Twitter to market their products, and I addressed that in "4 Rules for Marketing on Twitter." And seemingly mino...
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Social Media
4 Rules for Marketing on Twitter
October 26, 2010 • Paul Chaney
In last week's "5 Timesaving Social Networking Tools," I discussed efficient ways to manage your social media engagement efforts. However, social media is not merely a "tool set" to be used any way we see fit. It is also a mindset. For merchants wanting to use Twitter to market their ...
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Social Media
5 Timesaving Social Networking Tools
October 19, 2010 • Paul Chaney
A concern I often hear from those new to social networking is the amount of time it takes to manage engagement activities, such as tweeting or posting status updates to Facebook and LinkedIn. While there's no cost to use these channels, time is valuable and, therefore, the more efficien...
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