'Net Features : twitter, E-Commerce

Twitter Search Intrigue and Holiday Selling Tips

Mike Phillips — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:00:00 GMT

This week on Website Magazine Radio we address a very interesting Twitter search strategy to get indexed properly, found by Twitter searchers and get more clicks in the process. Also, we offer up several tips for the home stretch of online holiday selling. Get a better ROI using these holiday strategies.

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5 Cool Tools for Web Professionals (and Amateurs)

Administrator — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:00:00 GMT

As we prepare our next feature story for Website Magazine -- a guide to successful Web startups -- we have been doing some research for online tools that can help businesses get a good head start or keep tabs on the industry. Below are five resources you might not be familar with. From a Twitter tool to an innovative way to solicit user feedback, these should help any Web enterprise today and to plan for the future.

Do you have a favorite Web tool? Let everyone know by leaving a comment below!

	Tweet Nest - A browse-able, searchable, and customizable solution to backup/archive tweets is a useful way to turn back the Twitter clock. The best part might just be that the application is free and can be run from your own server (PHP 5.2 and MySQL required).

	Clue: A very interesting, free Web-based application that provides a way to ask people about what they remember about your website. Create a memory test with the Clue app and capture some valuable information on users' first impressions of your site.

	Huddler: A fully-supported SaaS platform, Huddler works with existing online discussion forum sites to integrate product reviews, wiki articles, image galleries and blogs to help increase community engagement and create a unified platform.

	iFeelGoods: Help retailers replace traditional promotions and incentives such as coupons and discounts with virtual goods and virtual currencies for a wide range of social games and networks.

	Klaggle: Offers retailers and online sellers a way to improve their businesses (engage visitors, keep them on site and drive revenue by accelerating user buying behavior) by providing access to online product review content.

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.”

Ready to TwitPay?

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:54:00 GMT

Is this the future of e-commerce?

Twitter commerce company Twitpay just announced its Retweet Commerce Suite, a service that aims to simplify commercials transactions on Twitter. RT2Buy (short for "Retweet To Buy") is the first service that is offered as part of the Retweet Commerce Suite. Starting today, anyone can easily distribute and sell their digital content through Twitter using the RT2Buy service.

"We believe that feed-based communication is the future of the Internet, and that commerce will play a tremendous role in that future," said Michael D. Ivey, CEO of Twitpay. "This suite is one part of making it as easy to participate in commerce as it is to use Twitter, and we're really excited to see what it will be used for."

R2Buy provides an interface for content creators to upload their digital content and promote it on Twitter. Users purchase the content by issuing a retweet (a reply that includes the content of the original message). Twitpay then handles confirmation of the payment with Amazon Payments and delivery of the content to the buyer.

"Independent artists and content producers desperately need simple solutions for distributing and monetizing content online," said Lynn Jeter, a music promoter and one of RT2Buy's early users. "Our clients are very excited about RT2Buy as a simple way for them to get their content out there, without having to spend a lot of time, energy or money. It doesn't get much easier than tweeting a link to your content and getting paid on retweets."

Twitter for E-Commerce

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:12:00 GMT

Many think e-commerce has no place in the Twitter-verse, but look at some of the top accounts and you'll think otherwise. From a one-person startup to a Fortune 500 CEO, anyone can use Twitter to connect - but not all are doing it as well as they could. Let's look at some ideas on how to use Twitter for e-commerce success, specifically promoting products and connecting with customers.

Read more on using Twitter for E-Commerce Success
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