BaysDesigns

Welcome To The Selling Lounge!

We are a friendly forum where sellers help sellers to help our/your online E-Commerce Business grow by having a place of resources and support along with help in promoting ourselves and each other.

I have been selling on line since 2003 in which I started out with eBay where I was doing very well as a Powerseller until all the fee hikes and changes. I then opened up my first Website almost 2 years ago and have been a member of a few very nice informative E-Commerce Forums and have learned so much about this new world of online selling that I wanted to have all my information in one place to help me succeed and by doing that helping others at the same time.

I have noticed that there is a ton of information out there on the net to help us become successful business owners and there are certain things that we must do in order to get our products out there and noticed and to get the buyers to us.

So I'm hoping that we can all share with each other "our tips" of "what works" and "what does not work".

April 28, 2009

Dog Dish Store on Twitter!

I don’t pay for any twitter tools and I recommend you do not as well. There are plenty of free ones out there. I don’t claim to be a Twitter expert, but I wanted to write this after seeing that many of you don’t have a lot of Twitter followers. I consider that to be less than 200 for many and less than 50 for even more. If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with friends and fellow sellers that’s fine, but if you want to market yourself on Twitter that won’t work. My purpose in using Twitter is to get sales and market to people that might be interested in my products. To use Twitter as a marketing tool you MUST get MANY followers that are interested in your product line. As of right now I have 1,100+ followers. I’ve been with Twitter only about a month and I do not pay to get that many followers. A lot of people will ask if you want thousands of followers and they’ll want you to pay for a tool, but who knows if you’re targeting your niche market with those techniques.

How have I gotten 1,100+ followers? Twellow.com (and Search.twitter.com sometimes) and Tweetlater.com. Allow me to illustrate. I did post these two tools in another post but I wanted to post them here to encourage everyone to take full advantage of their tweets.

Twellow:
*People fill out profiles on Twitter. Find the people that are interested in what you sell and start following them. If you’re lucky they will start following you. If they don’t follow after a few days or weeks (whatever time limit you set) UNFOLLOW. You don’t have space for that. I’ll revisit this topic further down. The interest I look for is pretty easy. I sell Dog Supplies so I just have to find people that are interested in dogs. If you have troubles figuring out what your customers may be interested in or who to direct, post here and I or someone else may be able to give you suggestions. If you sell antiques I bet there is an interest for antiques. If you sell rummage sale items you can probably find people interested in rummaging. Rummaging interest could probably also be for antique sellers. If you sell kids clothes look for moms.
*Twellow.com is where I found most of my followers of late.

I use twellow in conjunction with Tweetlater.com. Some points about tweetlater.com:
1. Unless you are really interest in what someone has to say (like for me it’s celebrity dish) don’t follow the person unless they follow you. Some people start following you just so you follow them then un-follow you once you are following them. You don’t have space on your account to follow people that aren’t following you. You have a max of 2,000 people you can follow before Twitter starts looking at the ratio of followers to following on your account. I don’t know what the ratio is but I hit 2,000 the other day and they wouldn’t let me follow anyone new so I knew it was time to clean out a bunch of people that were following me. I give people a few days to follow me before I will un-follow them. I try to keep the follow to followers ratio pretty close.
2. I don’t recommend un-following people that are following you just because you think you got ‘em. If you do that to someone like me I will un-follow you automatically.
3. Tweetlater has sooooo many functions. One being to un-follow anyone that un-follows you AND to automatically follow anyone that follows you. This is such a time saver.
4. You can also keep your multiple twitter accounts here so you can tweet from one central location.
5. You can set it up to receive emails when people tweet about keywords like your store name, something you sell or whatever you think you need to watch out for. I should note this tool hasn’t worked for me as I only received one email from it.
6. Tweetlater also allows you to set up tweets when you’re away from your computer. If you want people to constantly get messages from you set it up here. Remember that MANY people that will be following you will be following 1,000 others. So you want to make sure they read something from you everyday. If you only tweet once or twice a day you are going to get lost in the shuffle.

Don’t just post about your store on twitter. For me, that gets boring. If someone is following you that is only following 50 people they are going to get frustrated if all you put up all day is visit my store with a link. Frustration leads to an un-follow. Tell everyone about your day so you are seen as a real person. See what everyone else is tweeting about. It can be dumb stuff like “I just got the laundry out …. I hate laundry.” You might start a conversation with someone else that hates laundry. It makes you more personable.

I hope this helps everyone! I want to see higher numbers out there from everyone… if you want to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

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Angela
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Dog Dish Store
Diary of a Working Mom

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