euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

Social marketing through blogs, Facebook and Twitter contributed to web sales growth at Pegasus Lighting last year, says vice president Chris Johnson. Measuring its exact impact was the tricky part.

“We knew going into it in May of 2009 that we weren’t going to be able to see ‘x’ dollars in sales directly from social marketing,” Johnson says. “But in May 2010 we went over all our analytics and saw visits were up by 19% and orders were up 29%.” He notes that other variables came into play, but social marketing has helped get the company name into people’s conversations about lighting and that affected sales. “I don’t know if it’s directly tied to social marketing, but I have to think there is something there because Twitter and Facebook let us reach out to people who probably never heard of us before.”

Since we’ve started to explore mobile-enablement for e-Commerce here at euroblaze, we’ve been experimenting with several devices, applications and development platforms.

A smart little Canadian company Factyle came up with a nifty but super-useful iPhone app called smartr.  Any one of you who’s tried to read Twitter streams on mobile devices has probably been disappointed.

The pattern is all too familiar.  Scan down a Twitter stream, something catches your eye, you click on the link and lo, find yourselves waiting on a browser screen for the next 60 seconds, trying to load a bulky web-page with a ton of pictures and ad-graphics, or God forbid, Flash animations.

How smartr Works

smartr changes all that!  Using your iPhone login to smartr with your Twitter username/password and the nifty little iPhone app will scan your top-most Tweets, go to the links in those Tweets, prepare the content in a nice mobile-device-friendly format (which means strips the web-page off of any advertisement or graphical info) and presents it to you in a super-simple, super-readable format.

Just the Twitter summary I need when I’m on the go, have 4-5 minutes and want to read up on the latest happenings around my Twitter connections.

Many Tweeters post messages just for the sake of the passing on information that they have found interesting or userful, in very much the spirit of sharing the information with their “followers” .  On the other hand, most business-users of Twitter use the social-media platform for a specific marketing purpose, for example making an announcement or announcing a micro-event (such as product sales of xyz product reaching 100000 units).

The former category of Tweeters can be called selfless-tweeters and the latter selfish tweeters.

If you are an online product seller, it is a good idea to pass on as many selfless tweets as possible into your micro-blog.  This will result in your community members to make sure not to “filter-out” your tweets and infact keep a close eye on messages coming from you.

Of course, your social media strategy is not about passing on information to the world just for the sake of it, but rather to

Hence it is definitely purposeful to include selfish tweets on a regular basis; which include messages, promotions and announcements related only to your business.

Selfish Tweets, the Spice on your Twitter Feed

If the majority of your tweets which are selfless manage to capture the attention of your users, a steady and moderated inflow of selfish feeds will help you present your marketing messages to a more attentive group of users.  While they consume your selfless information regularly, they would be A) Open to recieving a few marketing messages from you and B) Pay attention to them, hence increasing the chances of following your calls-for-action.

In other words, from the marketer’s perspective, if the base of your Tweet-feed are the selfless tweets, then the regular stream of selfish streams will work as a flavor for the overall Twitter-feed.