Social Media Commerce

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Commerce For Dummies by Marsha Collier which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book as the title says is about marketing your business on social media and selling your goods or service. Many people nowadays especially if they are buying something expensive will look on social media sites like facebook and twitter and see what there friends recommend. Even one customer having a bad experience whilst dealing with your company can turn out to be very costly in terms of potential business from their friends. One mistake a lot of companies make is spending too much time on social media sites and getting bogged down in things that are unimportant. You have to be selective and you should also spend a little time enjoying yourself on a social media whether that be having a conversation with a friend or reading retweets on twitter. Facebook & twitter are probably the best social media sites for you to actually make sales. Linkedin & Google+ are good for showing off your work and in the former case you can ask and answer questions. Bear in mind if you have a technical support problem, there are a lot of tech savvy experts on social media sites and they are often only too happy to answer any queries. Also you should avoid the hard sell when marketing your business and bear in mind ideally you want to keep the customer for life and earn repeat business. There is a site called merchant circle which has local versions and if you have a business that does most of its jobs locally might be worth checking out. I enjoyed reading this book & it is quite interesting.

Something else I was going to mention is there is a site at http://headliner.fm which is a site for marketing your website. I have used it for one of my sites and was pleased with the extra traffic. When you join they give a set amount of virtual money and if you recommend a site or blog on either tumblr, facebook or twitter you get paid in virtual money. Then you can use that to get other users to promote your site on their tumblr, facebook or twitter accounts. You can only promote 1 site at a time although you can always upgrade to a pro account and also if you run short of virtual money you can buy some with cash. Obviously you have to be careful what you promote ie no get rich quick schemes, but I think it's a brilliant idea.