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How To Connect with Your Customers Where They Already Are

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A Guest Post by
Nisha Sandhu

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If you have an e-commerce business, many of the consumers who visit your website, regardless of the demographics, are participating in social media networks and sharing information on the internet. This means that the possibilities for marketing your products and services online are virtually endless, and there is a vast array of social networking channels for you to leverage, including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

With e-commerce, the most important factor in marketing via social media is selecting the best channels to reach potential customers. You can discover where your target audience likes to congregate by doing the following:

  • Polling those who visit your website or asking them to complete a formal survey to learn more about them.
  • Using Trackur, Social Mention or a similar free tool to get the information you need.
  • Leveraging relevant user information, which can be easily done with Facebook.
  • Studying the job postings, back links, keyword rankings and special announcements regularly to determine what they are doing in regard to e-commerce.

You should also conduct a “competitive audit” of your most serious competitors. Include the social networking sites where they participate, study the content they use, the number of hits they receive on every site, and the methods they employ to promote their products, services and special events on social networking sites.

In order to grow your business regardless of the social channels you use, attract consumers by offering them something they will never find anywhere else, such as promoting a contest. This should drive more traffic to your website and add to the number of your Facebook fans as well, if that applies in your case. You should also consider offering some incentive to those who follow you via social media, such as a discount coupon or free shipping, provide advance notice of a new product that will soon be available, or invite your customers to learn more “about us.”

  • Along with that, you might want to take the following steps as part of your online marketing strategy:
  • Share interesting news stories or messages that you gather from external sources.
  • Add a blog to your website and send the content to your e-commerce marketing accounts.
  • Ask for feedback from those who visit your website.
  • Include relevant videos and pictures to create interest in your company.
  • Make it easy for customers to buy the products you highlight by adding a link to the order page.

These are just a few ways to connect with customers where they already are.

Have you tried others?

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Nisha Sandhu is an Editor at merchantaccountforum.com, where she researches and writes online business advice for new and growing businesses.

Thank you, Nisha!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Cool Tool Review: Buffer – Get More Done on Twitter with 1 Simple App

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A Guest Post by Leo Widrich

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While writing this headline, I was a bit worried. Getting things “done” on Twitter can easily be misunderstood. After all Twitter is a place to build connections and meet with great new people. Optimizing things on Twitter has to be done with particular care I think.

Let me therefore introduce you to Buffer – a new Twitter App I have been using a lot recently which does two very important things for me:

  • It integrates seamlessly with my work flow and lets me share on Twitter in a consistent and time saving manner.
  • It doesn’t turn me into an “auto-bot” throwing tweets around without any connection to my followers.

How does Buffer work?

The core functionality of Buffer (http://bufferapp.com) is super simple. All you do is you throw a few tweets in your Buffer and the App then schedules these Tweets for you throughout the day. That’s it.

How will I get more done?

The great thing about Buffer is that you can add lots of tweets in at one point without fiddling with individual scheduling. Also you won’t ever overwhelm your followers with too many tweets in a row.

The way I use it is like this. As Buffer comes with a browser extension (Chrome, Safari, Firefox), you can add tweets to your Buffer from any page you are on.

On top of this you can even add tweets from inside Google Reader, which is a big winner for me. Whenever I like an article I hit the Buffer icon and add it to my Buffer. Here is how this looks with one of Liz’s posts:

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Add tweets from anywhere on the web.

Make your Tweets truly unique

Now, there is even one more functionality I want to mention here, which allows you to make your tweets really stand out from the rest.

Whenever you read an article and find a good line, just highlight the text and then hit the Buffer icon, here is what happens:

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Make your tweets unique

Timing of your Tweets

By default Buffer will send out your tweets well spaced out over the day, so you will never have too many tweets sent in a row, flooding your followers with tweets.

Of course you can always go back to your home account, click “settings” and adjust the timing to your needs. You can add more daily tweeting time slots or decrease them. Oh and as of recently there is also a “Tweet Now” function.

Add tweets to your Buffer from your mobile

What also comes in very handy is the option to add Tweets to your Buffer from your mobile. Whilst browsing an article you can simply hit the “mail link to page” or similar button.

Then you add in add@to.bufferapp.com and voila you have one more tweet scheduled where the link is automatically shortened and the title is in the page:

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Caption: Add to Buffer from your Mobile

Wrap Up

Even though Buffer is such a simple tool, it helps me a great deal to stay on top of Twitter. I can add tweets from anywhere with just one click and will make sure to add all the great articles I am coming across each and every day.

I have also started to use the mobile function whilst waiting in a queue or whilst sitting on the Bus and it is a great time filler, which actually gives me some results

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I hope you give Buffer a go. Would love to hear your views about it below.

Leo Widrich writes Tips for Twitter on his blog. You can visit his website, Bufferapp, or find him on Twitter as @leowid.

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Thanks, Leo, for checking out bufferapp.com for us!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!