Use Twitter to Promote Your eCommerce Website

By Adam  |  24 Jun 2015 15:00:00

I''ve written before about using Facebook to promote your eCommerce website and it's something that every person with an online business should be trying to do. But Facebook isn't the only useful online networking tool and today I'm going to explain how Twitter can be used to promote your eCommerce website. You may think that Facebook and Twitter are both very similar, but actually the strategies you need to use for them are both quite different.

Setting up a Twitter account is very simple, much simpler, in fact, than setting up a Facebook page for your business. Just go to Twitter and you'll see a 'Sign Up' box, in there write in the name of the business in the ‘Full Name’ box and fill in the rest of the details as appropriate. Before long you'll have your own Twitter feed. Upload an image which will be appropriate for the display picture (maybe the company logo) and write a short description of the company. I say a 'short' description not because I think it’s best to be brief, but because you're actually not given much space to write! Though there is a 'website' section, it can't hurt to put a URL in your description. To save characters, there are services, such as Bitly, which will shorten URLs for you (for free) and, as a very nice bonus, they'll count the number of times that these shortened URLs have been clicked on; it's a good way to monitor how well your Twitter is working as a promotional tool.

As with Facebook, your first few followers will probably be friends who want to support you; let people know about the Twitter account because the more people that see it, the more likely it is to be seen by even more people and, of course, hopefully a good deal of them will pass through onto your website too. It's also a very good idea to post a link to your Twitter on your website. If somebody likes a website, it's likely that they're going to look to see if that website is also on social media and, by look, I only mean on your website, rather than searching specifically. Maybe somebody visits your site, isn't in the mood to buy anything right away, but likes the look of it and so decided to follow you on Twitter (through a link on your homepage) now, whenever he or she is on social media, they will see regular posts from you, giving them constant reminders of your business. If they don't see a link to your Twitter, they won't follow you, they'll leave the site and potentially forget about it and never return. It is also a good idea to provide links to your Twitter (and any other social media feed) in emails you send to customers; people who only buy from you on odd occasions are going to see your emails more often than they will see your home page, but they may still wish to follow you.

The thing about Twitter is that it only allows you to make posts which are one hundred and forty characters long. This sentence is exactly one hundred and forty characters long; you can’t write anything longer than this on Twitter so you must be concise. That should give you an idea of how short 'tweets' are. With that small number of characters you can alert customers to discounts, flash sales, new stock and whatever else. It's also nice to give reflections on things that are happening in the world at large "Have a happy Easter, from all of us here at..." kind of thing. Importantly, however, for Twitter to be effective, you mustn't make it all about you and your business.

One of the most helpful things on Twitter are hashtags. By searching through hashtags you can find the Twitter users who are most likely to use your product or service and target them directly. Let me explain: if you're selling old science fiction memorabilia, then you can search '#scifi' and find all the Twitter users who have been tweeting about science fiction. Then you can look through their tweets and find something of theirs that they've shared and tweet something positive to them in response, maybe even retweeting it so that all of your followers can see it too. It's a great way to reach new people while also helping your customers to do the same. Doing this will cement you as a friendly and reliable company and as somebody they'd like to do business with. It's this networking ability which makes Twitter such a powerful social media outlet.

So, if you've got your Sellr site all set up, don't hesitate to get the ball rolling with Twitter! It may well prove to be quite an untapped resource of customers. If you don't have Sellr, but you do have a business idea, then you should get Sellr; it's free! You've nothing to lose and if you get started on a Sellr site, even if you only work on it for a few minutes a day, you may one day be making money from it.