My Etsy Journey: Marketing My Shop (part 1)

Have a chat and a cup of tea, won't you? (photo credit: woodsy)

Halo lemonheads! I know that you usually see a Terrific Tuesdays project on my site today, but I hope that you will indulge me a bit. Today I am going to share something a bit different. A recent tweet from Vivien (aka @inspirationbit) asked if I had ever blogged about how I marketed my Etsy shop. The thought really hadn’t occured to me. I thought that particular topic had been done to death, but I started to think about it. Everyone’s road is a bit different, so maybe I should share mine.

I have done a little bit of everything to market my shop, so I thought I would break this up into a few parts that will span the next few months. (I promise to mix Terrific Tuesdays projects in as well!)

This week I am going to address social media and the importance of it to my business. Before I get started, I do want to give you the disclaimer that I am by no means an expert and I can’t promise these techniques will all work for you. This article is totally based on my experience. If just one tip helps you, then I feel this has been a successful series.

So, let’s get on with it! Social Media…Those can be very scary words to people that haven’t delved into this crazy world of online chatting. Let me put you at ease. It is as easy as talking on the phone or text messaging. If you have done either one of these, you can do Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Twitter

This is my twitter stream - @purplelemon

Twitter can be a bit intimidating if you have never done it. I promise that once you get into it though, you can become addicted. I want to start by answering a few questions you may have…

What in the heck is twitter anyway?

Twitter is basically a conversation among you and your followers.

What is following (in relation to twitter)?

This is adding people to your friend list. To see what others have to say, you follow them. For others to see what you have to say, they follow you.

Hi Ashton! He gets a lot of chatter stirred up about twitter...

To follow someone (once you have signed up), all you would do is click his or her “Follow” button.

Who should I follow?

That is totally up to you. If you are an Etsian, follow @Etsy. Also, follow some of Etsy’s followers. Do you like the decor8 blog? Follow Holly @decor8. Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge also has twitter handle. It is @design_sponge. Do you like the crafting round up blog One Pretty Thing? Guess what? Rachel is on twitter (@oneprettything) too.

By the way, if you do decide to try twitter, I would hope you would follow little ole me. @purplelemon

On the note of following, make sure to follow people that follow you. They only people that I don’t follow that follow me are people that appear to be spammers.

Ugh…I am not a graphic designer – Do I have to create a background for my twitter stream?

Don’t stress…Actually twitter has some great backgrounds available in their settings panel, so it is not necessary to have a custom background.

So why does anyone care what I have to say?

Everyone has a special gift…so share it with others! Do you like articles about design? Share the link a good one you read with your followers. Do you like to craft? Share projects you are working on (people love to see your crafts in progress). Did you have a weird experience at Wal-Mart? Share it like I did.

Twitter is a great place to get your business noticed, but it is a place to make friends first. Start a conversation with one of your followers. You will be surprised at how quickly you can form relationships. I started friendships with some of my favorite bloggers. @creativecurio is one of them. I read her blog for a while and then noticed she was on twitter. We started following each other, tweeted back and forth and have formed a very nice friendship. How else could I form a friendship with someone I didn’t know that lives in California? Cool right?

I do want to caution you a bit if you plan on using Twitter to promote your business. Don’t just send out tweets about your shop. Make friends first and then sporadically tweet about items you sold or new items you are adding to your shop. You can quickly turn people off and they will unfollow you (or won’t follow you at all).

Twitter jargon:

There are a few things that I had to figure out when I jumped on twitter, so I will give you a crash course.

@ – the “at” symbol – This is how you talk to people on twitter. If I wanted to talk to Kimba with A Soft Place to Land, I would write:

Love me some Kimba!

# – the hash tag – This one stumped me for a while. People mark their tweets with # so they will be easily searchable in the twitter search feature. I am on the EtsyTwitter team and we mark tweets about our team with #EtsyTwitter. This makes it easier for team members to find what each other are saying.

#followfriday – This is one of the hash tags that is very popular on Fridays. (This is a great way to find good people to follow too.) Many twitter users will give shout outs to their favorite people on Fridays so more people will have a chance to find and follow them.

Direct Message – This is kind of like a private tweet between two people. You can only Direct Message people that you follow and that follow you too.

@yourtwitterhandle in the sidebar – You will see this in the sidebar of your twitter stream. You can click this and it will show you all the times that you are mentioned in conversations on twitter.

I guess I will stop there. I could probably write a series of articles just on twitter, but you would probably be bored out of your mind.

If you have specific questions about anything I have talked about today, please email me at kelly {at} purplelemondesigns.com or leave a question in the comments section. If there are enough questions, I might even do a Q & A.

Facebook

Facebook has slowly gotten to be more like twitter in its user interface. I am not going to address the personal side of Facebook, but more the business side of Facebook. It is frowned upon (or I think even illegal) to create a profile for a business. That is because you can set up groups and fan pages for businesses. Fan pages are a great way connect with Facebook users. I probably don’t put as much time into my fan page as I should, so I am not going to go that deeply into it. You can view it here: Purple Lemon Designs Fan Page

The PLD Group Page on Facebook

I do use my Purple Lemon Designs Facebook Group more so than my Fan page. I use it to interact with facebookers, show product, and it has a messaging feature where I can send out a message to all my members. I don’t use this feature often because I don’t want my members to think I am spamming. I have used it to offer special discounts and to target specific holidays/shopping times. View it here: http://groups.to/purplelemondesigns/

I try not to put a lot about Purple Lemon in my status updates on Facebook because once again, I don’t want to constantly spam my friends.

Timothy Adam has written about using Facebook. View some of his posts on Facebook here and here.

There are more social networking sites on the interweb, but these are the two I have time for. Feel free to explore the online world though.

So lemonheads…What questions do you have? Is there anything that you think I should write about in this series? Ask in the comments, and I will answer the best I can! Thanks for reading.