Monday, March 12, 2012

Cutting Through the Spam

SPAM... it's not good for our bodies and it's not good for our business.

SPAM is quick and easy.
No thought involved.
Just click the "share" link without giving any thought to it.
I'm guilty of doing this... everyone is...
but I'm going to break that habit right now.
I know I talked about this a few weeks back but it's important.
It's so important that I'm going over it again and tomorrow I'm going to share something that will make it super easy for us to promote each other without that icky spammy feeling.
We want to get links out there and we want people to click on them.
We want REAL views.
We want those views to turn into sales.
We want those sales to turn into repeat customers.

I'm on the Etsy Rockstars Team and we promote each other's shops twice each week and often times in between.
I go through the list and tweet each shop's chosen item.
If I click the tweet button and hit enter... this is what I have when I'm done:


These are the generic tweets.
I've just bombarded my followers with tweets that really don't draw attention. It's just me spamming a bunch of tweets. Who is going to click on that? People may even begin to look past my tweets because of this.

So today I tweeted a little differently. I asked questions directly to the shop owner. I linked them with the @ so they can reply to my question or statement. It's more interesting! It draws more attention. Those same tweets now look like this:

People like to know what's going on and be a part of it. If they click the OPEN button, which I do a lot, they will see this:


They'll see the lovely shop images in the listing AND they'll see that my question was answered and the colors available. This is also the kind of tweet that would be good to forward on to Facebook. I normally don't have my tweets sent to my facebook page. However I DO have my facebook posts sent to twitter. The reason I do this is because I only want to have a few posts on facebook every day, more can look spammy. Especially if I just throw a bunch of links out there and don't say anything about them.

The more "meaningful" conversations you start on twitter, facebook, google+ and linkedin, the more people will actually see you and begin to look for your conversations. The more they look, the more likely they will be to join in. You want to make yourself stand out from the spam.

Another easy way to make your tweets look less like spam is to send them out through the day instead of one after another after another. I use www.timely.is to send out up to 9 tweets through the day. When I hit the tweet button in etsy or pinterest, I'm given the option of adding it to my schedule with timely.

And of course, since simple is always better, there's an even easier way for us to promote each other. Remember last week, I told you about Click to Tweet? In tomorrow's newsletter, we're going to talk about using that free service to promote each other effortlessly. Ok well... not effortlessly... but pretty darn easy! So don't miss it!



PS... I'm also going to show you how to put your pinterest page on your facebook!

With all this talk of tweeting, I can't leave you without giving you a tweetable!



4 comments:

  1. Very good info! I like the twitter questions:)

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  2. Great post! Thanks for the info!

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  3. Guilty of spamming? OK, I raise my hand...This is a GREAT blog post! The only thing is...Sometimes shops have different twitter names, and I'm forgetful. Any advice on that part? I do try to change up my tweets, though. Gonna try your way today. =)
    ~Kim

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