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RSS FeedGoing Social – Using Social Networks Like Facebook, MySpace & Twitter to Increase your eCommerce Sales
Ummmm… Do you Facebook? When’s the last time you “twitted”? Odds are, even if you’re not using these social networks yourself, you’re at least familiar with them and the tremendous amount of buzz that they can generate for virtually anything in the world — a person, a business, a cause, a product, a video, an artist… You get the idea.
So how you do even begin to apply the capabilities of these and other social networking sites to your eCommerce storefront. How about adding a “share on Facebook” link on your product pages? Suppose I’m browsing your site and see a product that I know my friend would just love. Wouldn’t it be great if I could click a button and post your web page in a message to my friend’s Facebook account, or better still, put a post directly on my wall for all my friends to see? How about making it easy for your customers to become part of your own network (e.g. become friends, get linked in, subscribe, etc.)? Need to let your customers know of a highly anticipated new product? Easy, just post it on your wall and every one of your friends will see it.
We’re going to focus specifically on some of the more popular social networking sites, however with a little digging, you’ll find that enabling this type of functionality for any networking site is often as simple as adding a link.
Adding a “share on Facebook” link to your site is as simple as just that… Adding a link. Facebook provides very simple instructions for adding such links to your website at http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php. Just copy the code directly from their page and paste directly into any of your PDG templates. For PDG users with a “skin set”, adding it to your Top or Bottom nav template automatically enables it for every single PDG generated page on your site. Even if you’re working with your own custom templates, simply adding it to the “item” template automatically enables it on all of your item details pages.
You can also add a link for users to see/view your public profile, allowing them to quickly and easily become your friend. You can either link to your own personal account, or set up a company “page”. Setting up a company page will allow users to become “fans” of your organization, and every time this happens, all of their friends will see this info in their status updates.
To link directly to your company page/personal profile, you can create a Facebook “badge” by performing the following steps:
1. Start from the Facebook home page.
2. Click on the “My Profile” link to view your current profile after you have logged in.
3. Select the “Create a Profile Badge” link that can be found on your profile (link found at the bottom of the left hand column).
4. Choose a template to help create your badge. A photo badge showcases your most recent photo uploads. The Signature Badge has your contact information and is ideal for email and forum signatures. The blog badge is a great addition to your external Web site or blog.
5. Set the preferences for your template. While they may vary slightly, you must select a layout (Horizontal or Vertical) and a format (Image or JavaScript) for each template.
6. Finish making changes to your badge and click “Save” to get directions for posting your badge. You will need to copy and paste the provided code into the PDG templates where you want the badge to appear.
See http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages for more information on setting up a company page and some ‘best practices’ as you get started.
Twitter is a social messaging platform that allows you to post in real time what you or your company are currently doing. Enabling a Twitter link on your website allows anyone browsing your site to update their Twitter account that they’re currently browsing your website (with a link to your site! — http://www.pdgsoft.com/blog/archives/58).
To add a “post to twitter” link to your webpage, just add the following code:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"><!--
{
document.write('<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading%20at%20'+window.location+'">Post to Twitter</a>');
}
// -->
</SCRIPT>
Note that each %20 in HTML hyperlinks will be replaced with a space. The above example should work on virtually any webpage. If you want to modify the twitter post from “reading at [url]” to “shopping at [url]“, just change the text within the link. If you want to go a step further and make your item “details” page say “buying [product name] from [url]“, you could use:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"><!--
{
document.write('<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Buying%20a%20!---DESC---%20from%20'+window.location+'">Post to Twitter</a>');
}
// -->
</SCRIPT>*note: The blog software will likely either break this up into multiple lines and/or not display the entire code snippet, however when you copy and paste, it should re-assemble everything correctly…
The resulting post to Twitter would say something like “PDG is buying a small gadget at site.com/[url of small gadget page]” . With many twitterers having hundreds or thousands of people following their ‘twits’, how valuable could them updating their status in this manner be for your site?!?
MySpace
Adding a link to your MySpace account allows your customers to learn a little more about you, and hopefully become a ‘friend’ (e.g. a loyal follower and purchaser!). Just add a link to your pages to “find us on MySpace”, with the link pointed directly to your http://www.myspace.com/[your user name]. Hopefully, satisfied customers will also link to your web site, in turn introducing you and your products to their friends as well.
These are just a few ways that you can leverage the mega-power of social networking sites to increase traffic, revenue and profits for your business, but don’t here… Look for your own unique ways to implement or use these services to get a leg up on the competition. Any one of these services can help a) adds legitimate/useful links to your site (that both other humans and search engine robots can follow) b) increase your brand awareness c) increase revenue/profits and d) let you get away with a little bit of fun at work. 
