E-commerce Site Gets 300,000 Visitors in Twitter Promotion

Linc Wonham — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:00:00 GMT

Still not sure exactly how — or even why — you should be engaging with your e-commerce customers through social media? Then take a look at one of the most creative uses of Twitter we’ve seen yet, and how it landed 300,000 visitors onto the site of online footwear retailer SuperShoes.com in less than two hours.

SuperShoes recently held the first-ever known games of Twitterbingo to promote its new Drag & Share feature, which it introduced as a way to integrate social media onto its e-commerce site. The Drag & Share feature prompts customers to drag an item from a product page and drop it and its corresponding link information onto a Twitter (or Facebook or e-mail) icon to initiate two-way communications between merchant and consumer (and consumer’s social networks). Modeled after the classic game, Twitterbingo took the new feature a step further by assigning hidden messages representing each of the five letters of “BINGO” to five predetermined products, and then dropped hints throughout the two one-hour games to help customers find the products they needed to earn letters.

The SuperShoes team also used Twitter to explain the game and the Drag & Share feature, answering any questions in real time through a series of tweets. “Once they understood how to use the new feature, we just sat back and watched the tweets fly,” explained Frank Malsbenden, SuperShoes’ VP/General Manager Vision Retailing. “Twitter is the only platform that allows us to simultaneously teach, engage, entertain and converse with customers while exposing our brand and products to their entire social networks.”

While the goal of the game was to introduce Drag & Share, SuperShoes.com leveraged the opportunity to gain hundreds of thousands of impressions for its brand and its products. “Because every tweet contained links to our site, we not only extended the reach of our message and our brand but ensured that we saw residual activity after the game had ended,” said Malsbenden. “I don’t need to see another study or read another white paper to see the power of social media, I’ve seen it for myself.”

Vanity URLs and Getting Social

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:54:00 GMT

How do you increase interaction with your brand? Perhaps you should take a page form online footwear retailer Supershoes.com, who has given its visitor/users the ability to create Vanity URLs.

The feature allows visitors to select a custom vanity URL for their profile pages on the site which can be populated with their favorite products and even uniquely tagged items. These Vanity Pages offer customizable profile pictures and “page stats” that seek to engage customers with a tally of Visitors, “Likes”, “Retweets”, and “Facebook shares” their page has garnered. The Vanity Page design promotes the social shopping concept with a “Profile Grid” showing the profile images of the most “liked” Vanity Pages and a “Live Feed” that shows actions being taken across the site in real time. Sharing is encouraged not only through the personalized, easy-to-share URL but with heavy tie-ins to Facebook and Twitter.

Vanity URLs are just the latest step in Supershoes.com’s strategy of increasing interaction and socialization across its site. In September of this year the company reported double digit increases in product page visits, conversion rate and customer interactions on product pages by launching a number of new features including the ability to rank, tag and share products customers like or dislike. “Love It”, “Hate It”, “Tag It” and “Share It” buttons were added to all product pages this past May.

“Customers want to connect with each other and to do so in real time” explains Frank Malsbenden, VP, General Manager of Vision Retailing, Inc., “our Vanity Pages are designed to focus on these two key components of e-commerce specifically: social connectivity and Real Time Web.”

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'Net Features : supershoes

E-commerce Site Gets 300,000 Visitors in Twitter Promotion

Vanity URLs and Getting Social