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- Advertise Your Craft Business (18)
- Advertising: Ads on Your Site (9)
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- Social Networking Tips and Tools (38)
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Social Networking Tips and Tools
Is social networking using sites such as Twitter and Facebook a major marketing opportunity or major time suck?
Find out how to make social networking work for you. We've got tips and advice for using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as a wide range of time saving applications which will help you make the most of your social networking time.
Social networking can be a great way to make contacts with other crafters, customers, suppliers and more from around the world. The key tip for successful social networking is ensuring that you see a return on the amount of time invested. As with any part of running a business, setting goals and measuring your performance (for instance number of contacts made etc) will help to ensure that the time you spend is well invested.
Pinterest for MadeIt Sellers
MadeIt is an Australian based handmade products marketplace and this article looks at offering advice to those selling on MadeIt on how to make effective use of Pinterest. Advice is broken into clear bullet points and the tips here will also be of interest to craft business owners who sell their products through other online handmade marketplaces.
Share Instagram Photos to Facebook
Instagram has become a hugely popular social image sharing site that makes it very easy to share photos from a mobile phone with a wide range of other users. This tutorial explains how you can also link your Facebook page to your Instagram account so that you can easily share your photos on both sites at the same time. Placing good looking photos of your products on social media sites can be a great way to keep interest high in your craft business, as well as helping potential new customers to discover your work.
Ten Social Media Mistakes
This article on Forbes looks at ten common mistakes that are made by businesses engaging in social media campaigns. Each bite sized point comes with pointers on the correct way to positively address any of these issues that readers are guilty of.
Google+ for Small Buisness Marketing
At the time of writing, Google+ can be easily overlooked by many small craft business owners, with the focus being on connecting with potential customers through Facebook. This piece looks at how Google+ and Authorship can be a powerful tool in a marketing strategy. This will only apply to those who are already actively blogging for their business or are preparing to make this move. For such business bloggers, this piece discusses how they can increase their authority on subjects and so use content to connect with a larger audience.
15 Social Media Tips for SMBs
The whole world knows that they have to be on all of the social media sites to be successful. This piece, however, considers whether that is the complete truth and also offers tips and advice that will help small business owners, such a craft businesses, to use the various available social channels effectively.
Facebook for Business
This section of facebook is dedicated to supplying information to small businesses to help them gain the maximum benefit from having an advertising presence on Facebook. The section includes a range of information, including advertiser best practices, new product launches and success stories from others using Facebook.
Five Advanced Twitter Tips for Your Small Business
This is a page for those craft business owners that use Twitter that shares tips on making the most of Twitter to market their business. Broken down into five bite sized chunks, this should be accessible to all Twitter users looking to get more from the platform.
Facebook for Wordpress
This Facebook produced Wordpress plugin is designed to make it easy to share posts and pages to Facebook through several different methods. If you're already using Wordpress to power your blog or website, this plugin could be a real time saver in sharing your new posts automatically on Facebook.
SocialBro
SocialBro is a downloadable desktop application or Google Chrome browser app that offers a comprehensive suite of tools to allow you to analyse activity around your Twitter account and also undertake some actions on your account, such as unfollowing non-followers. Time spent studying the metrics SocialBro tracks will help yo to use Twitter as a more effective and powerful social marketing tool for your craft business.
How to Increase Your Facebook Edge Rank
Edge Rank is Facebook's algorithm that they use to determine which updates are propagated into other users' feeds. Obviously the higher you score on this factor, the more people will see updates that you post to your Facbook page, which could make a big difference to the effectiveness of your marketing messages. This article on Business2Community talks you through the aspects that you need to focus on in an attempt to increase your Edge Rank.
ShortStack
ShortStack offer a range of tools that make it easy for anyone to produce enhanced Facebook pages. This can make it easy to add fan only tabs and integrate widgets, such as polls to canvas user opinions and competitions. There are several service tiers available based on the number of Facebook likes that you have with a free tier on offer for accounts with smaller numbers of followers.
Pinerly
Pinerly is aiming to offer Pinterest users a range of tools to make the most of Pinterest to promote their business. If you've ever used Hootsuite to aid in your social media activity, you'll have a reasonable understanding of how Pinerly aims to make business promotion on Pinterest a more easily managed exercise.
Follow Me Stickers
Here's a simple idea that seeks to bridge the gap between the web and the real world. It's a simple concept of stickers that carry information about a business' social media presence and this is further enhanced by the inclusion of QR codes that users with smart phones can scan in order to Like or Follow various accounts. The stickers are offered in a variety of sizes, suitable both for display in bricks and mortar outlets as well as smaller sizes that could be added to products that are sent through the post.
Get Started with Social Media
This free ebook in PDF format from Meylah covers advice on how to leverage the power of social media to promote your business. There is wise advice in that making the most of social media takes time and results do not just happen. However, it is worth continuing as once you hit a critical mass, the growth of interest can become exponential.
Plan Your Post
This online service from TabSite is a tool designed to help craft entrepreneurs and business owners to manage their posts to Facebook and Twitter in a more efficient way. You can use Plan Your Post to prepare posts in advance and let them drip to Facebook and Twitter at set times allowing you to work more efficiently by preparing your social media communications in a block. An inbuilt url shortener is a handy utility and analytics are also included. There is a free service tier for those needing less power, though analytics is one of the features missing from this service level.
Get Started with Social Media
This is a free PDF ebook from www.Meylah.com offering a range of advice for small businesses that want to get started with using social media as a marketing tool.
Izzui - Free Facebook Content Creation App
Izzui is a free Facebook app and website that they claim will help users to build communities around their business. The aim is for Izzui users to create online courses that will help position products and services and encourage others to engage. The service allows users to produce content as well as search for other intersting items on Izzui and share that with others, helping to build up an authoritative status.
Tweetadder
This is a desktop tool for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux that offers powerful tools to find Twitter users to follow. The app can be set up to do this automatically and also set your tweets live at preset times.