Learning How To Be Social Using Social Media
I’ve read everything I can to learn how to sell successfully on the internet. Most of the articles and books I’ve read agree you need to use social media, although I’ve read some that say it’s a waste of time. I set up accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Etsy, Facebook, Deviantart, Handmadespark and I started a blog, oh and I just added LinkedIn. That’s a lot and it’s hard to keep track of. I set up Google Analytics on some of my sites; it’s a cool, free program that tracks how many visits you get, what websites are referring, key search words, and probably some other goodies I haven’t figured out yet. I set up all my accounts and waited and nothing happened, no sales, no followers, nothing.
I did more research and thought about it and realized, maybe, since it’s called social media you actually need to be social. All my friends who know me in real life will tell you that is difficult for me, I’m very shy and not very social, but I decided to give it a try. I joined some teams on Etsy, which turned out to be one of the best things I’ve done. This last week I’ve been very active on my social network and I saw some big results in my tracking. The views on my pages went way up. My sales haven’t but I believe that takes time and the more people that are looking eventually I will get some customers. Just like in a brick and mortar store you need to have people coming by and looking before you can get sales. The last two days I took a break and sure enough all my views and my traffic dropped dramatically. All this has lead me to the conclusion that social media does work. It definitely drives people to your sites. Now that I know this I’m going to set up a daily schedule of how long to spend working on my network, jewelry making, checking email, writing articles, commenting on blogs, etc.
Tracking my visits has also helped me to see which sites are the most effective so I can whittle down my list of the ones I spend time on and hopefully spend my time online more productively. It also has helped me to narrow down my target market so I can more effectively market to those customers. I know if I keep at it I will eventually start getting more sales.
