10 Tips for Using Social Media in Holiday Ecommerce Marketing

The holidays will soon be upon us. With just 26 days between Black Friday and Christmas and a reported 15.5 percent growth in ecommerce sales at stake, retailers should leverage every marketing opportunity.

Social media is one such opportunity. It can help extend brand reach, build awareness for promotional efforts, support overall sales activity, and do so at minimal expense to the merchant.

With that in mind, here are 10 social media marketing tips you can employ this holiday season. 

1. Use Social Media as a Layer, Not a Channel
Don’t think of social media as an individual channel, but as a layer that blankets other marketing activities. While it may not prove to be a catalyst that directly contributes to sales, use of social media can support everything else you do. The key is to think omnichannel and integrate social media into every activity.

For example, tie social media into email marketing by asking people to share your message with their friends and followers. Add social sharing buttons (including the Pin It button) to product pages on your website. Create content on your website that people will want to share, as well as social network content that links back to your ecommerce site.

Read my post, “8 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Existing Marketing,” for more ideas. 

2. Decorate Your Social Media Graphics with Holiday Themes
Almost every social network utilizes profile images and cover graphics. Some, like Twitter, also include background images. Put your shoppers in the holiday spirit by updating such imagery with seasonal themes.

If you do not have access to a graphic designer, sites like fcoverphotos.com or Canva offer plenty of ready-made images. Pixlr, a easy-to-use photo-editing tool, enables you to overlay text on graphics. You can also achieve the same effect with PowerPoint.

Example of fcoverphotos Facebook Christmas cover graphic.

Canva is a do-it-yourself image creation and editing tool. 

3. Give Your Content Visual Appeal

One of the biggest social media marketing trends to emerge from 2013 is the use of visuals. So, in keeping with changes to profile and cover graphics, add some visual spice to your holiday posts.

Facebook timeline post graphic featuring a Christmas sale.

As a general rule, include a graphic with most of your social posts. Add a graphic element to blog posts so that when visitors share your content on social networks, the image will appear along with it. 

4. Use Pinterest to Inspire Shopping Ideas
Pinterest is especially popular during the holiday season as people look to it for inspiration on everything from Halloween decorations to Thanksgiving table centerpieces to Chanukah and Christmas gift ideas.

Two simple ways to build on that interest include creating holiday-themed boards and adding Pin It buttons to product pages on your site. 

5. Run Contests on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Contests are a fun way to utilize social media, especially at this time of year. Sites like Offerpop and Antavo have several out-of-the-box contest solutions to make it easy.

Antavo offers six different types of contests. 

6. Send Personal Holiday Greetings to Loyal Customers

Businesses can take a cue from individuals and send special holiday greetings to customers via social media as a way to express appreciation. It’s an unexpected message for them that could lead to increased sales for you.

Create a Vine or Instagram video and post it to your Facebook Page timeline, send out direct messages to customers that follow you on Twitter or host a Google Hangout with your most loyal customers just to say hello. If you happen to be friends with customers on Facebook, send an e-card using an app like the one from 123 Greetings. 

7. Create Relevant, Interesting Content
Posts to your blog, Facebook Page, Twitter feed or another social network should not be just about you and your products. Think in terms of creating content around topics of interest to your customers, particularly during the busy holiday season.

That could include creative seasonal decorating tips, a list of ways to reduce stress during the holidays, ideas for making the holidays more meaningful, inspirational quotes, and more. 

8. Support Organic Efforts with Advertising
Social media ad campaigns are cost-effective when compared to other forms of advertising and are a good way to increase reach and introduce new people to your brand or products. 

9. Draw on Your Customers’ Social Influence
Shoppers are more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals. Because people tend to trust others with similar interests, it makes sense to draw upon your customers’ influence. Due to its inherent sharing capabilities, social media is a primary outlet to make that happen. 

10. Support a Worthy Cause
People’s minds turn to giving during the holidays, and that doesn’t mean just friends and family; charitable giving tends to rise, too.

Businesses can use social media to achieve social good — by supporting a worthy cause. Aside from the benefits charities receive, it is a way to build goodwill between you and your customers that can result in greater loyalty and increased lifetime value.

Use crowdfunding sites such as Go Fund Me or YouCaring.com to provide your customers with an opportunity to give, as well.

Paul Chaney
Bio  

SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLAINED

The Future Of Digital: 10 CEO Predictions At D11

Electric cars, beer-proof tablets and wearable computers were just a few of the ideas (or developing products) dancing across the minds of the D11 guests last week. While perspectives ranged from the foundational to the unbelievable, all shared a vision that is extraordinary in scope and virtue.

When it comes to the future of digital, here’s what the CEOs on stage had to say: 

Big Data ROI
“There is a massive business opportunity in using software to anticipate industrial equipment maintenance needs,” said Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE. “Take the jet engine. It has about 20 sensors that capture real-time continuous data—temperature, engine performance, etc. If I can take that data and use it to model a consumer outcome—say, more time on the wing or less fuel burn—that’s worth an awful lot of money to my customers. A one percent change in fuel burn for an airline is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” 

Connected Stadiums
Sony CEO Kaz Hirai and San Francisco 49ers chief Jed York are teaming up to bring “beer-proof tablets” to the stadium experience. Come 2014, their smart stadium will connect fans in more ways than just replays. The tablets will be capable of showing the best places to park, the best routes to stadium destinations and even ordering food from your seats.

“The camaraderie of being at the game—there’s nothing like that,” York said. “We want to take that great home-entertainment experience and bring it to the stadium.” 

Electric Cars and Trips To Mars
“I think it’s important that we transition to sustainable transport,” said Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity. “Eventually we’ll face extremely high gasoline costs and the economy will grind to a halt if we don’t.”

Musk says the ultimate goal, though, is to get technology to the point where it can take us to Mars.

“Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct,” he said. “An extinction event is inevitable and we’re increasingly doing ourselves in.” 

Fertility Apps
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s latest project aims to help women get pregnant. His new fertility company, Glow, uses analytics to track ovulation cycles and advise best times to conceive.

“My wife and I were lucky. We had our children without any issues,” said Levchin. ““But we have people close to us that have gone through multiple IVF trials, and we’ve heard them say, ‘We’re not going to put my wife’s body through this anymore.’”

Beyond pregnancy, Levchin hopes to use this model to give people more data on other areas of their health that will ultimately decrease health care costs overall. 

Internet Of Things
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann thinks his company is well positioned for the future of the Internet.

“Many things were once very text-based and very popular,” Silbermann said. “But instead of being time-based, we made it visual . . . I think the web and media are becoming more visual in general.”

Silbermann also freely admitted that Pinterest isn’t making any money yet, but that it takes “more of a long-term perspective” to build a company that will stick around. 

Mobile Data
“Transport will become free,” said Cisco CEO John Chambers, predicting that cellular data charges will fall like voice cell service. “Architectures will change. With intelligence throughout the network, the network will become the platform of the future.” 

Smarter Phones
This fall, Motorola will release a “hero device” called the Moto X. The new phone will have a variety of always-on sensors that makes it more contextually aware—like knowing when you take it out of your pocket.

“We’re going to play a different game than Motorola has played in the recent past,” said Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside. “It’s not going to radically change the world in the first launch, but we do think that the products will find their markets.” 

TV Disruption
“We’ve recognized that Twitter is the second screen for TV, and TV is more fun with Twitter,” said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo when asked about the next stage of the company. “There are a bunch of ways that we can be complementary to broadcasters. Traditionally, many in our area have viewed broadcasters as competitors—we think of it as complementary. 

Virtual Assistants
“I think we will see virtual assistants within two years that are quite robust,” said Nuance CEO Paul Ricci. “I also believe that within two years we will see that virtual assistants will work across platforms.” 

Wearable Computers
Wearables were a hot topic at D11 this year, especially with the buzz surrounding Google Glass. Here’s D11’s compilation of prominent speakers (including Hirai, York, Costolo and Tim Cook) sharing their thoughts and feelings about wearable computing devices, the future of that industry and whether they plan to get involved. 

And of course . . . Apple isn’t about to give anything away.
“We release products when they are ready,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We believe very much in the element of surprise. We think customers love surprises. I have no plan on changing that . . . We have several more game changers in us.”

Author: CEO.com Staff

10 Ways to Add Pinterest to Your Marketing Strategy (Infographic)

BY Karen Leland

 Pinterest may be the third largest social media site after Facebook and Twitter, but it's still a relative newcomer to the scene. Businesses are actively searching to create boards and pins that inspire customers and promote their brands. From integrating with other social media to pin placement to image creation, there is a learning curve for many companies getting started on Pinterest.

The infographic below, from my new book, Ultimate Guide To Pinterest For Business (Entrepreneur Press, 2013) provides the 10 best ways to promote your business using Pinterest:

9 Ways to Build Your Pinterest Audience

BY Karen Leland 

 

In her book Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business, marketing and branding expert Karen Leland provides a Pinterest roadmap that will help you drive website traffic, boost your brand and build business. In this edited excerpt, the author outlines nine strategies that will increase the number of people following your boards on Pinterest.

 

If you're looking to be highly proactive in increasing your Pinterest following, here are some strategies to consider: 

Build more niched boards.
Take a look at the most popular players on Pinterest, and it will become clear they have a plethora of boards, usually between 50 and 100, on average. It's also obvious that those same users have gone to great efforts to make their boards as niched as possible so they stand a better chance of being found (and followed) by a targeted audience. For example, if you're a cookbook writer, a single board named "desserts" that features all manner of sugary goodies would work, but you might draw more followers if you took that same board and split it into four:

• Pies and cakes
• Cookies and bars
• Chocolate
• Ice creams, sorbets and puddings

By refining your boards to be more relevant to the people who are the most interested in those specific topics, you increase your chances of getting followers. 

Jump on the trending topics bandwagon.
People, places and events that are popular at the moment make great bait for finding new followers. Topics that are trending will be getting keyword-searched on the site, and if you have a pin that fits, you stand a good chance of picking up some of that traffic. Reachli.com says that pins related to trending topics see an average 94 percent increase in click-throughs. So it pays to pay attention to the trending topics on Pinterest and to what's trending on other social media sites. A few great resources include:

• http://trendsmap.com/ provides a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world
• http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends shows the current hot searches in the United States

Post to your most popular boards.
For those boards of yours that have a significantly larger following than others, post with slightly more frequency. Since more people are following these boards, your chances for a higher rate of repins -- and hence new followers -- is greater. 

Follow high-profile and highly relevant people.
While the criteria for whom you follow should first and foremost be the relevance of their pins to your business and brand, there's a case to be made for having at least 10 percent of whom you choose be the big dogs in their fields. By following these power players, you increase the chances that they'll follow you back, repin, like, and comment on your images, and give you greater exposure to their large followings. 

Use keywords in all your pins.
Paying attention to SEO is a significant part of pinning. The more on target you are with the keywords you use in your boards and pin descriptions, the more likely you are to draw followers searching for and interested in those topics. 

Promote Pinterest with your email newsletter.
Given the stringent no-spam requirements that exist for email marketing today, it's a safe bet that the people already on your distribution list want to hear from you. Several ways to build your Pinterest following with a newsletter include:

• Announcing your presence on the site in a regular newsletter you send and encouraging readers to click through and follow you.
• Sending out a pithy, photo-heavy announcement about your Pinterest, inspiring your tribe to find out more.
• Enticing readers to visit your Pinterest by placing a Pinterest icon that links through to your page on all email newsletter communications and featuring a "hot" pin or two you've recently posted.

Add Pinterest to your email signature line. 
 You have the opportunity with every email you send to anyone -- client, potential client, friend, colleague, stranger you just met on the airplane -- to promote your Pinterest and gain followers. Simply add the dedicated URL of your Pinterest to the end of your signature line, where the links to your other social media (website, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) live, and allow people to follow you with a single click. 

Reciprocate.
A good best practice is to always check out a new follower, or someone who has liked or repinned one of your images, and consider whether you want to follow them back. Some of the criteria to take into account include:

• Are they a major player in the same space? If so, consider following them, since your audiences are likely to be the same.
• Are they pinning interesting, beautiful or highly informative content? If yes, they're worth following as a regular resource for repinning.
• Are they someone on whose radar you'd like to be? Following someone increases the chances they'll follow you back and gives you regular opportunity to comment, like and repin their images.

Karen Leland

Karen Leland is an author and president of Sterling Marketing Group, a marketing and brand-strategy firm based in San Rafael, Calif. Her book, Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business, is available at entrepreneurbookstore.com and other booksellers.

The Rise of Pre-Commerce

Written by: Lisa Gansky

The sharing economy and crowdfunding have fundamentally altered the way we develop products.

 

Business is social. At its core is a seemingly endless series of social interactions--not just internal relationships, but external ones as well, involving investors, suppliers, resellers, customers, government agencies, even competitors. Over time, these ongoing conversations and exchanges fundamentally shape the products, partnerships, and value footprint of every successful brand.

While the social nature of business is nothing new, the recent rise of globally networked social media and the growth of the sharing economy has changed the rules of the game. Old business models are coming apart at the seams. Outsourcing, crowd funding, viral marketing and access or subscription-based services are challenging historically favored strategies in many areas--including, perhaps most surprisingly, product development. The fantasy that the customer waits for products to be developed and distributed suddenly appears to be so last century.

Welcome to pre-commerce, a powerful product development engine fueled by social networks and propagated by designers publicly honing their voice and story. In some industries, community voices just became more powerful than executive off-sites and PowerPoint. 

Company As Driver: Top Down
 

At the height of the Industrial Age, product development followed a more or less linear road map from manufacturer to customer, with established corporations unilaterally defining new offerings, design specifications, production volume, timing, pricing, positioning, shape, color and distribution channels. In this model, data from surveys, focus groups and customer feedback provide a certain amount of advance intelligence, but there’s always a good deal of guesswork involved in forecasting market demand. Guess wrong and you end up with a warehouse full of unwanted widgets, a tarnished brand and a boardroom full of angry investors.

Top-down product development worked well enough for the big guns of 20th-century commerce--wealthy corporations that excel at refining consumer products through multiple iterations and cultivating brands across multiple generations. But this approach tends to favor large organizations that can afford to invest heavily in R&D, and also absorb the cost of swinging and missing a few times before knocking one into the bleachers. For smaller players, it’s one strike and you’re out.

 

Community Takes The Wheel: An Outside-In Approach
 
The social media platforms that link millions of people in radically horizontal relationships have enabled a new twist in the product development cycle.

The process goes something like this: A company or individual comes up with a product concept and puts together a low-cost web-based presentation to pitch the idea directly to potential micro-investors and/or customers. In many cases, the essence of the pitch is fully contained in a short video featuring a prototype demo and a personal appeal from the product designer or company founder. Almost always, a palpably human story is what sells these products and programs. The pitch is published online, typically on a crowd funding site such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Catarse, Ulule or Quirky, and promoted via social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

These products and services typically exist only as ideas or prototypes. The proposition is that the product will only make it into your hands if the developer reaches a defined threshold of support from a community of fans (and future customers). In other cases, developers can test the market by selling early-stage products at very low volume through incubation-oriented ecommerce marketplaces like Etsy or Threadless. Either way, the developer has the luxury of refining a product based on real customer feedback before deciding whether or not to ramp up production.

Accelerating Innovation And Ditching Waste
 
When people first began to contemplate the impact of social media on business, much of the attention was pulled in the natural direction of customer support and public relations. Now that we all have the ability to connect, collaborate and act together in numbers, social media has emerged as a powerful thread that connects business innovators to customers. Since 2009, nearly $2.8 billion has been raised on crowd- and community funding services, a substantial portion of which funded new products or businesses. This means that products are being bought (or not) before they are made and distributed.

This model is scrappy and sensible. It reduces waste, encourages innovation, gives smaller players a shot at the marketplace, and ensures a built-in community of customers who will support entrepreneurs from the start. If proposed projects or products do not secure a minimal level of support, that insight alone is highly valuable--both financially and for brand equity.

I call this model pre-commerce (riffing on the term "pretail" coined by trendwatching). It may soon become an essential pre-launch step for any product road map.

Risks And Rewards: The Path Ahead
 

 

There are new challenges that go along with the presale of a product from a nascent or nonexistent company. One of the principal problems has been a lack of due diligence regarding the feasibility of the product proposed and presold. With no third party evaluating the project developer’s competence, presumer backers incur the risk of late or no delivery.

For players big and small, here’s something else to consider: Pre-commerce gives competitors early access to strategic information that would otherwise be considered company confidential. However in the increasingly open, connected and transparent world of social media, access to new ideas, product prototypes and community interest is readily available. Additionally, many product ideas come from outside our organizations. The visibility within and between companies makes the pulse of innovation accelerate and easily cross borders.

We are early. To date, this method has been used almost exclusively by upstarts. Going forward it’s not hard to imagine that well established brands like GE, Proctor and Gamble, Unilever and Bupa will source and test new product ideas beyond their organizational walls. As product cycle times decrease and the cost of waste (unused inventories, patents and talent) increases, the scope and frequency of experiments will grow. All the incentives and much of the infrastructure are already in place.

Now is the time. What separates your brand and company from a world of innovative independent designers is only a semi-permeable membrane. Invite, explore, learn and refine your company’s reach and capacity to provoke innovation through pre-commerce.

Lisa Gansky

Lisa Gansky is an instigator, entrepreneur, angel, and author of the bestselling book The Mesh: Why the Future o

Commanding your business' social media

As social media has grown in importance, some businesses have committed substantial resources to create their own listening centre to give them a wide and detailed view of the social media landscape.

A new infographic from BeingYourBrand will make interesting reading if your corporation is planning its own social media centre at the moment.

Picking several businesses that have well-established social media centres the infographic makes it clear that one size doesn’t fit all. It’s vital that your business clearly assess what insight your command centre will be required to give about the social media landscape your company is part of. Only then will you be able to build the tools that are needed to track the vast quantities of data available, and of course make commercial sense out of these touchpoints.

A social media obsession

If your business has an inkling that its customers are social media obsessives, your hunch is correct. New research from Experian has revealed that UK consumers spend nearly a quarter of each hour on their social networks. In the US this figure is slightly higher at 16 minutes, but UK social media users are more likely to buy goods and services during these sessions.

James Murray, Digital Marketing Manager at Experian Marketing Services commented: “The online landscape is constantly changing and we’ve seen some pretty dramatic shifts in consumer behaviour across different geographic regions and in the various vertical markets. Consumers are changing the way they interact online and the rise of 3G and now 4G mobile internet access means more visits are being made on the move, particularly in social and email.

“As brands become increasingly global entities it’s more important than ever to understand the differences between regional online behaviours so that marketing campaigns can be tailored for better and more effective brand engagement.”

Is Pinterest the new Facebook for marketers?

A new infographic from BloomReach puts a shot across the bows of Facebook by claiming that for marketers looking for good ROI, Pinterest is clearly the platform to be exploiting now. This certainly seems to be the case with corporations stating that they intend to increase their marketing spending over the next five years from their current 8% to a whopping 21%.

What is interesting is that the research that BloomReach have carried out shows that more Pinterest users are ready to buy when perusing the site. Also, when a brand moves from simply building its number of followers – which Facebook is clearly the leader at here – moving to more targeted marketing on networks like Pinterest pays dividends as 22% more traffic on Pinterest converts than on Facebook.