Different strategies for FB, Twitter, and Pinterest

[Tonearm]

My original plan was to post new products to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Now that I'm experimenting with it, I realize that the way each of these sites work is very different. Has anyone been able to get a handle on this and develop a different ecommerce strategy for each of these social media sites?

[oliondor]

Is it really worth wasting time on these social medias ?

[jwolthuis]

Is it really worth wasting time on these social medias ?

+1 Have to agree. We invested lots of time in FB and Twitter for a year, and had *zero* ROI. Hundreds of Likes and Follows, but nothing to show for it at the bank.

[lorax]

It's much harder to find value in social media for many eCommerce sites. Especially if you're not a large retailer or mfr/retailer of your own products.

[jrockfl]

Wait wait wait...
Yes, you should spend time with these social media sites.
We also focus on Instagram and YouTube.

We have contests, giveaways, discounts, tips, news, etc on the majority of these sites.

I have 1 full time employee and 2 interns working our social media presence.

We would not be in business today without social media.

[RhinoFish]

for some things, Facebook ads can drive a lot of traffic, though ROAS is hard to control (but it can be done).

as for likes and follows, bleh.

disclaimer: we data driven marketers have strengths and weaknesses - am not claiming our way is THE way. our way is often a very good way, but the rare exception we may miss, can be a grand one.

[Tonearm]

@jwolthuis

We invested lots of time in FB and Twitter for a year, and had *zero* ROI. Hundreds of Likes and Follows, but nothing to show for it at the bank.

How did you determine that none of your sales came from social media?


@jrockfl

We have contests

Did you use an app for that? If so, may I ask which one?

In what ways do you treat the different social media sites differently?


@RhinoFish

for some things, Facebook ads can drive a lot of traffic, though ROAS is hard to control (but it can be done).

How can the ROAS be controlled? I read about the FB Conversion Tracker on facebook.com but I can't find it anywhere in my account interface.

[Tonearm]

Right now I kind of see FB/Twitter/Pinterest in the same light as email marketing (which I have yet to set up for some reason), except that the marketing messages are really easy for the recipients to share with their friends.

[jrockfl]

@tonearm,

No we do not use an app. I know for facebook, there are certain guidelines, but we dont follow them.

We will have a different contest on each of the social media sites.

Sometimes on FB we will just create a post saying reply to this post stating why you should win this free prize.

Everyone is using social media, i believe it is crucial for business.

Some people use Twitter and not FB and vice versa.

[Tonearm]

Thanks jrockfl. Maybe I'll throw together some kind of haphazard contest and see how it goes.

[RhinoFish]

implement your own tracking links and conversion reporting (google analytics is one method you might use for this).

adjust segmented bids.

[ssgumby]

We do something similiar to @jrockfl

Here is how we do things.

We run contests on FB, contests are usually the "vote" type meaning we accept photos posted to our wall and then the one with the most votes wins. We wrote the app ourselves, it really is quite straight forward to do so.

We have FB tied to twitter, so posts from FB go direct to there.

Not used pinterest much yet.

Was really quite interesting, we ran a contest to generate more likes, basically a "when we reach x likes we will give Z to charity". Somehow a large marketing company heard about it and did an article on us about how savvy our approach was and how quickly our likes rose.

The downpart of FB is that not all your fans see all your posts, you now have to pay to promote posts for higher visibility.

[Tonearm]

@RhinoFish

implement your own tracking links and conversion reporting

That would be easy for ads that link to my website, but impossible for "Sponsored Stories" or ads that link to my FB page. The FB Conversion Tracker would solve that but it doesn't seem to exist in my account. I spent a long time looking for it.


@ssgumby

The downpart of FB is that not all your fans see all your posts, you now have to pay to promote posts for higher visibility.

Yes, and the ROI is currently impossible to track because of the above.

We have FB tied to twitter, so posts from FB go direct to there.

I believe this functionality is built into FB? How do you reconcile FB's long text and multiple photo format with Twitter's short text and single photo format?

[lorax]

but impossible for "Sponsored Stories" or ads that link to my FB page

If you control the link you can track the click using a redirect script.

[Tonearm]

If you control the link you can track the click using a redirect script.

Ads that link to your FB page must start with www.facebook.com. For Sponsored Stories, there's no way to present a different link when the post is and isn't being paid for. For those reasons, ROI can't be tracked for either type of ad without the Conversion Tracker which doesn't seem to exist.

[lorax]

Ads that link to your FB page must start with www.facebook.com

Ah, you're talking about Ads that you purchase on Facebook.

[Tonearm]

Do people buy ads outside of FB for their FB page? :)

[lorax]

I know of one that did. The Facebook page is/was their only online presence up until last fall. They ran with it for a number of months while they figured out what they really wanted to be.