Ask Your Website Hosting Firm If Social Networking Can Boost Your Sales

Ask Your Website Hosting Firm If Social Networking Can Boost Your Sales

As people across the nation (and the world) become more and more infatuated by social networking many ecommerce owners are wondering if this an appropriate venue to consider as a way to increase traffic and sales. So, is it a good idea? That apparently depends on who you ask.

Website Hosting Firm Discusses Social Networking

Social networking - larger and more influential than anyone anticipated

A recent survey conducted by the American Marketing Association (AMA) indicates that social networking sites may be positioned to play a larger and more influential role in ecommerce than anyone anticipated. Almost half (49%) of respondents in the survey complained they would seek out shopping information, including information about sales and discounts, at social networking if the sites offered such information. “Social networking sites provide some of the most powerful word-of-mouth marketing opportunities than there have ever been,” said Nancy Costopulos of the AMA. “It’s past fad and into the reality zone.”

Does social networking steal the thunder from etailers sites?

According to AMA, social networking could, in some cases steal the thunder from etailers sites. In the AMA survey, 74% of those surveyed said they would visit a social networking site to search for a gift and 29% said, if the opportunity was there, they would buy products on the sites.

Data collected in a recent Jupiter internet research survey indicated that, while social networking and ecommerce may be closely linked at some point “the jury is still out” on how effective this tool will be at boosting sales. “Sometimes social networking sites can drive a huge amount of traffic to the site all at once, but they are not necessarily people who are in buying moods. Even 2,000 views to a particular item coming from stumbleupon.com resulted in only one sale. However, getting that many eyeballs into the store can certainly help when those same people want to make a purchase later on.”

According to a Hitwise study, the shopping and classifieds sites that benefited the most from Facebook in recent years were eBay, Amazon, Gateway, Walmart and the Craiglist. “With the growth of Facebook and others, online retailers should seriously consider social networking as a source of additional traffic.”

Social shopping sites

Some online marketers have attempted to harness the power of social networking by creating “social shopping sites” that combine the networking power of Facebook with the data-crunching muscle of Google, and in the process adding a little more humanity to the act of shopping online.

What’s different about social shopping? For all its power, Google can’t tell shoppers what’s cool or what their friends or like-minded consumers recommend. Social shopping sites, on the other hand, do just that, which provides new opportunities for small online retailers to reach consumers. A search for “men’s shoes” on a typical search engine yields the most prominent brands and retailers within the first few pages of results. The same search on a social shopping site not only displays a wider array of smaller, and arguably cooler, brands, it points the users toward the store that is recommended by the site’s most fashion-conscious and influential users.

There is one important “watch out” here. These sites are geared to consumers, not marketers, so you have to tread carefully. Still a single recommendation from a well-connected and influential user can generate considerably more visibility than many marketers could achieve on Google or Yahoo! and even better, it’s free. “On the major search engines it can be all but impossible for small retailers to percolate to the top of the search process,” said Sucharita Mulupuru, a senior retail analyst at Forester Research. “There’s no question that social shopping could be hugely beneficial to small businesses with limited marketing resources.”

Talk to your website hosting provider about using social networking.

Talk to your website hosting provider about the possibility of using social networking to boost sales. Your host can help you gather the data you need to decide if this is the right venue for you.

Using Social Media to Find Customers

Posted in Social Media

Using Social Media to Find Customers

Tips from your Website Hosting provider

As a small business owner, the race to gain an audience may seem like an obvious goal. But before you jump onto the social media bandwagon it is important to develop a solid strategy because, without one, mistakes can be made.

Top Three Tips for finding customers through social media:

1. Realize that social media is a big time commitment.

Social media is free and it is where customers' congregate, but it takes a lot of time. You have to be willing to make a serious time commitment and stick with it. Many people underestimate that effort and time requirement associated for an effective social media campaign. If you put something out on social media, it does not always go viral. To be effective with social media, you need to post regularly with quality content and support your social media campaigns. If you have a twitter account, for example, you need a blog so that your tweets can have links that visitors can click on to reach your blog articles, and ultimately your website or shopping cart. If you post on Facebook, on the other hand, you need to do it regularly and post quality content so that you encourage visitors and engagement to build a community. On Facebook you can post videos, links, and comments, but more often than not, an effective Facebook campaign consists of relevant posts in "first person"—posts that are engaging, entertaining, personal, and timely.

2. Provide value to enlist followers.

Ultimately social media is about delivering value to people. The companies that use social media effectively have followers because they deliver information that is useful. If you look at Facebook, Twitter and blogs, for example, people that use them effectively do it by delivering useful messages and information which encourages people to tune-in. Any business owner worth their salt knows people love to get something for free. The question is…. is what you are handing out through social media enticing enough?

Delivering value to people is the ultimate goal. Effective marketers have followers because those followers see a benefit and recognize the value.

3. Go where your customers go.

One of the fundamentals of successful marketing is having a clear picture of "who" you are going to target. This includes knowing your target audiences' behaviors, their patterns of usage, and most importantly—where they congregate. And this is the same situation in social media. Just because you launched a LinkedIn or FourSquare campaign, does not necessarily mean that you will gain customers from those campaigns. This is especially the case if your target audience does not visit those social media sites in large numbers. LinkedIn and Foursquare are wonderful tools, but they attract certain demographics. Don't use Facebook or LinkedIn if your target audience is not using those tools.

Who is your target audience?

First of all, decide "who" you are going to target and then you can decide where to find those people.

Making a mark in the social media world can result in a huge pay off for small business owners, but it is important to know your limitations and plan for them. Using social media takes effort so it is important to determine if your target audience is using social media tools and which ones they frequent. Know these facts prior to launching a social media campaign. Social media can be a positive investment for small business owners if it is planned beforehand with an effective, well-planned strategy.

Oh, and don't forget... go green with green website hosting.