by Krista Bunskoek
Twitter can be a powerful medium to reach your customers, and increase your eCommerce sales. But, many marketers still don’t get it. How do you break through the micro-blogging noise? How can you use the site to increase traffic to your online store? Influence marketing.
Influence marketing is getting your industry’s social influencers to share your content to their Twitter followers. This drives more reach for your content, increased trust, and traffic to your online store.
Here’s 10 ways to execute on it:
1. Find your Influencers: Do Twitter searches for your niche hashtags. Follow top people who tweet with your business keywords. Do a search on Social Influence Metric sites like Klout, PeerIndex or Kred.
2. Make a list: Sort your Following into lists, such as:
- Industry leaders
- Influential customers
- Influential bloggers
3. Retweet: Retweet your Influencers’ tweets. Be selective with content that’s of value to your market, too. For example, retweet a great product review, or a how-to link from the Influencer’s blog.
4. Favorite: Get noticed by your social Influencers by favoriting their tweets. You aren’t sharing their content, but you can develop relationships by acknowledging their great Twitter content.
5. Use @mention: Most Influential tweeters check their @mentions regularly. It’s the way to communicate directly with someone on the site (and much better than a Direct Message). @mention a leader or customer if you mention them on your website, or ask for their valued opinion.
6. Make your tweets retweetable: Post intriguing, visually appealing tweets with an enticing CTA to click-through to your store. Make it easy for your Twitter Influencers to share your content.
7. Create a business blog: If you don’t have one already, set up a blog on your eCommerce site. Then use it. This gives you fresh, relevant content – which is not only needed for SEO, but it also gives you great stuff to use on Twitter. It gets people clicking on your site, and more familiar with your brand.
8. Tweet interactive content: Make engaging stuff on your ecommerce site – such as photo contests, sweepstakes or coupons. Then tweet it to your Influencers.
9. Tweet-gate a free product: Giveaway a product or webinar for free – just by getting your interested consumers to tweet about it.
10. Give Influencers your product for free: Reach out to your Influencers, and offer them your product for free. Ask that they tweet what they like about it, with a link to your online store product landing page.
Do you use Influence marketing in your strategies? Share your tips.
Krista Bunskoek is a content marketer at Wishpond, and author of such ebooks as Influence Marketing: How to Increase your Blog Traffic and Twitter Content Marketing. Wishpond makes it easy to run social contests & promotions, make online ads, generate leads and nurture sales conversions with email automation campaigns.
