Marketing tips 1 - facebook

16 May 2011

Welcome to the first in our series of Smallfish 'Marketing Tips'. We’re all about making it easy to set up and run your own online shop. Getting the most of out of your business often comes down to how much time and energy you have to invest.

We’d like to pass our on experience and expertise and so, over the next few months, we’ll be providing some simple tips on how to maximize the potential of your business with online marketing, Google Analytics and more.

First up: a few tips on using social media sites like Facebook to increase traffic to your online store. To use a fishy metaphor: rather than casting your rod out and hoping for a bite, by taking advantage of the (mostly) free social media sites and marketing tools out there, you can do some serious deep sea trawling.

Facebook

The first thing to do is claim your brand name before someone else does. Even if you don’t think you will use Facebook, Twitter or one of the many other sites out there it’s well worth setting up an account with some of the bigger ones.

Go to facebook.com, twitter.com, linkedin.com and flickr.com and set up an account. These are some of the most popular social networking sites for businesses: all of them are free to join and each has their own benefits. Linkedin for example is business oriented while Flickr is an excellent host site for image and video content.

To claim your own ‘vanity URL’ or named, branded page on Facebook you need to have at least 25 fans. Setting up a fan page on Facebook is almost as easy as building a shop with Smallfish. Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the simple steps, adding content like photos, information and your contact details. Try and keep the tone and style of your website consistent with your social media pages. You want to build a brand that your customers and friends will recognise and feel comfortable with.

Next you’ll need to get some fans! If you have a personal Facebook page already, invite your friends and family to join your store’s page. Send a link to your Facebook page in e-mails to customers. A great way to get followers is to add the ‘like button’ feature to your store on the Smallfish website. It’s easy: go to the 'Connections' page under 'Manage Shops' on the Smallfish website.

It goes without saying that to get the most out of having a Facebook page you’ll need to have some interesting content: Facebook works best if you’re constantly active. This doesn’t come easily to everybody. You can generate content on your Facebook page in a number of ways.

Here are some of the ways our Smallfish customers use Facebook:

The Vintage Love site has nearly five thousand followers on Facebook and Stacey interacts with all of them regularly, answering queries and running promotions

Gillian from Le’Esscience uses her Facebook page primarily as a way to educate followers on the benefits of aromatherapy and says “because I will never get to meet a lot of my customers and it’s important to be available and approachable and I can do that through Facebook, Twitter and my blog. It's also a very good way to get traffic to my website too!"

Debbie from Gracie Lou uses her page to field new requests from her customers and feature sales discounts and specials. “We’ve got over a thousand fans on Facebook and it’s been a really good entrance point into the site for us.”

Candygirl have a Facebook page called ‘Do you love nail polish?’ and link their blog (and the blogs of others that mention them) to their own page and then back into their shop. If you have an existing blog this is a natural way to generate content on your Facebook page. Use the tools at Networked Blogs Facebook app to incorporate yor blog into your Facebook page.

Between them, these stores have 10,000 followers on Facebook and all of their pages link back to their Smallfish websites which helps them generate more sales.

Even if you don’t feel up to creating and maintaining an online presence on social media sites, you can still make use of the millions of followers out there who do. Connect to our share buttons and let satisfied customers spread the word on Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other social media sites. Customers and visitors who like what they see will then be able to post links to your shop to their friends, their family and their own social media followers.

All roads lead to Rome so the saying goes. By utilising Facebook and other social media you open your business up to a potentially massive audience where all of the paths head straight back to your online store created with Smallfish.