Starting the day checking social media I got this informational screen when starting up Twitter.
So now the password is changed and security is tighter.
Instgram shopping has come to Sweden
Recently Instagram released Instagram Shopping in Sweden.
As involved in E-commerce business I had to give it a try so I opened Instagram and went into settings and since it is a business account I found Shopping. Went into shopping and did activate it and got the product feed from the facebook-accounts store as source.
Immediately did a (valid) test-post which technically works fine – people who click end up at the products page at my website. Smooooth as the commercial say 🙂
Some things to consider to make this work this smoothly:
- you have a website with a page for every product
- you have a Facebook-page (as a business)
- you have products in your Facebook-store
- you have a business-account on Instagram
- you enable the feature.
Once this is done you do have one more channel to sell things thru.
Now you should develop a plan for how to do it.
/Palle
Pin it
Yes it´s been a while (again) and I’m not a good example on updating consistenly but now I found time and subject.
The subject is social media and I will put focus on the function to pin a post to your profile on different plattform and give example:
There is at least three platforms that offers the possibility to pin a post to your profile today, that is Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
The reason to pin a post to your profile is that it doesn’t get lost in all your posts – it’s said that you should not make a selling post more often than every 3-5posts. To pin your important posts to your profile makes it easy to get them viewed for persons interested to know more about you.
So how do you go about it?
On Facebook you can do it by using your computer and on the downward arrow in the upper right corner choose pin to page wish makes your post stay on top.
On Twitter is as easy – in the Android app you just click the downward arrow and choose pin to profile and says yes on the question you get.
On Google+ it’s a little more effort that is needed, on the computer you need to go to your profile page and choose the post you want to pin. After finding it you go to the upper right corner again and choose pin to profile.
If you are interested to see examples please visit our Facebook-page, Twitter-profile and Google+page.
Regards Palle
Use of google commands
The free report I get every month on how I am doing in Google SERP for the business also tells me about some of my competitors. If you don’t have this possibility you can find some of your competitors by using related: on google – in my case I used one of the sub-categories since the main page gives irrelevant results – the result is can then be used to go to your competitors and spy on their pages to get ideas for your site (remember to not steal just get inspired).
If you go to google and type link: and your site you will get webpages linking to you – some should be from your own site and some is from registers of different kinds but there is probably also some from customers and persons with an opinion about you. And this could be done for your competitors sites as well to find things you might not know about.
This two commands could and should be used for different pages on your website – preferably consistenly (as well as blogging see my last post).
A third command is site: which gives you a result saying which pages on your website got indexed. If you are missing pages it might be because they are new – like new blog posts – or they haven’t got indexed for another reason, try linking them and posting them on social media.
Best of luck!
/Palle
Updating consistently
Updating should be done with consistence regarding time – a thing this blog is not a positive example on. My excuse is that the businesspage and blogg is top priority and I’m being consistent over there.
And by the looks of things I’m doing something right because as I checked my google rankings today I got a new number one (garderobsdoft) since my last check in may (see reaching the top) – this makes 6 top phrases on google. And on top of that (sorry for geek humor) I’ve got 17 more first page entrys in the Google SERP. So today there is an extra kanelbulle to the fika 🙂
I am a beliver in continous learning and thanks to the book mentioned in the blog post reaching the top, other books, seminaries and online resources I’m improving my knowledge and seeing results from it.
In some way you can say that doing e-commerce is a bit like going to the gym – at the gym you use machines and life weights and get happy the more you lift, as a e-commercer you get happy ranking high on google, having more followers, have increased visits and conversions.
And one way to get more followers is to update continously which I sure will try to do here as well so stay tuned 🙂
/Palle
Lists on Social Media
After a while being active on Social Media the number of contacts are becoming large and it can sometimes be hard to keep track of your contacts. To ease this some of the Social Media platforms gives you the opportunity to group and label your contacts to find them more easy.
On Facebook you can go to Friends where you can make and edit lists to which you can add your friends to different labels and you can also choose to publish to friends with in a specified label / group and read what they have to say.
On Twitter you go to your profile page and choose lists to add and edit you lists and you can then go thru your contacts or any tweeter and add them to existing list via settings and add to list. This makes it easier to find persons.
On LinkedIn you go to My Network and Contacts where you can see all your connections and on the left side sort the by labels which you can edit. Once you got a label you can select contacts and label them. Makes you find people faster.
On Google+ you can make different circles to put people in. You can either make a new circle when you find a new person of interest and holds the cursor/your finger over the following button or you can go into Persons, Following and scroll down to Your circles under which you can manage your circles. You can then post to certain circles or read from them.
That’s all for today – keep smiling!
/Palle
Reaching the top
It’s important to learn new things and when it comes to e-commerce one good thing to learn is how to reach the top of search enginre result pages (SERPs for those in the business).
I made it to the top of Google with my name since all the links on the first page is about me even though not from me (at least when writing this).
I feel more thankful for the 24 first page entries that I got for the business although almost no budget has been used to accomplish this. Especially proud to say that I have five (dammsugardoft, ekologisk lust, fräschare kläder, garderobsdofter och lugnande doftolja) phrases where I currently is number one.
And this is before opening and reading the book that’s supposed to give me lots of advice on how to rank high on Google – wonder what will be….
Stay tuned for updates on this and other subjects in my life in e-commerce, social media and marketing.
/Palle
Multiple accounts on Instagram
So Instagram has released the possibility to manage multiple accounts without logging out – Thank you!
Since a have a personal account and helps out with a business account on Instagram I got happy thinking it would make things easier. It’s really simple to set up – just go to our profile settings and choose to add a account.
It doesn’t seem to be a ready to go functionallity though – it mixes things up between the accounts – at least on my smartphone which is a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+.
As highlighted in the picture below it looks like the business account made a comment but it was from my personal account.
Notifications shows up with account name on the home-screen but sometimes gets mixed up when I click them to check further or take action.
So some confusing stuff to finish off before being real good – maybee take a look at Twitter for inspiration.
/Palle
Marketing on Facebook
As a e-commercer it is important to do PR or marketing if you prefer. And the best way to do this is online and where your customers are when they are in the mood to buy.
One channel to use for PR is Facebook and communicating with the networks of your current customers. Normally an e-commerce site collects customer info at the time for an order and this info contains name, address, cellphone, email and more. Since it’s fairly easy to set up an e-mail account it is also fairly common for customers to e-commerce sites to have a second e-mail-address to use to recieve mail from thoose sites. Usually you don’t have two cellphones though and therefore it is more relevant to use cellphonenumber as primary contact surface since many persons also use their cellphone to visit Facebook and other siter. Don’t neglect the email-adresses though.
As I was helping my lady with this for her e-commerce site we ran into a little issue with the phonenumbers. Facebook wants the list in .csv or .txt format and we did chose the former as format to export from our platform which opened Excel to view the data. Since all phonenumbers in Sweden start with an area code beginning with a zero this meant problem as the initial zero-digit got lost in excel as insignificant for numbers (when the user entered their phonenumber using just digits).
Since I wasn’t to keen on dropping the issue or to manually edit all phonenumbers I decided to find a solution which brings me to my point with this post.
To solve this problem I selected the phone-column in the original .csv-file with all the data and pasted this column into a new excel file in column B. Column A was filled with the digit zero and both column A and B was then selected and formatted as text. In column C (generall format) I added a formula “=Sammanfoga(A2;B2)” which propably is called Merge in English and Voila in C2 the correct phonenumber appeared. This formula was then being multiplied to all rows below taking hold of the cell-border and dragging it downwards. After saving it all it was to much data in the file for Facebook to like so I copied the C column, opened another Excel file and positioned myself in A1 to use Paste special and selecting just values (“Värde” in Swedish) to paste in. Saved it and Done!
Regards Palle
Updating
Recently I told you that I got data about orders out of Magento – well now I also get data about stock levels into Magento.
I found this guide on connecting to Magento with Soap and together with this forum-post on StackOverFlow I got it to work. Simple functions so far, but it works!
Regards Palle
Palle Lilja 