Zazzle Blog

It’s Seller Wednesday! This week we’re focusing on fun ways to use Twitter to promote your store, products you’ve recently created, and more.

Twitter is a way to reach out to existing or potential customers, and fellow sellers, to promote your Zazzle stores and get feedback on your products. It’s super easy to get started on Twitter and start promoting your store today. Let’s begin by setting up a Twitter account, then I can show you how to promote your store.

Step 1: Go to Twitter.com

Step 2: Click on the yellow “Let me in” button; I’ll walk you through setup.

Step 3: If you only want this to be for your Zazzle store, and don’t like the idea of people knowing your true identity, under “Full name” put your Zazzle handle.  The name you put in for your full name will be the name that’s used if people are looking for you on twitter, and they don’t know your account handle.

Step 4: After you click the “Create my account” button, it will take you to suggested accounts to follow based on your interests.  You click on one of the side categories, and it pops up with the most popular Twitter accounts in that category.  When you follow people, whatever they tweet will show up in your twitter feed, which (if you’re more familiar with Facebook)  is kinda like your “news feed”.

After you’ve had your fill picking from the suggested accounts, you click on the bottom link “Next Step: Friends”, and it will give you the option to see if anyone in your email address book has a twitter account.  Once you’ve followed all the friends you want daily updates from, go ahead and click on “Next Step: Others”.

This section allows you to find people you want to follow, but maybe couldn’t find in the suggestions or through your email… we recommend following Zazzle – we are awesome on Twitter (and all around, really).

Click Follow… you know you want to.

Step 5: Once you follow Zazzle (and finish finding other twitter accounts to follow), Click the “Next Step: You’re Done” button, and it will take you to your twitter homepage. Be sure to check your email and verify the address you used in your setup.  That way, they can send you notifications when someone follows you, or sends you a direct message (DM).

Step 6: Now that you’re on your homepage, you can see all the tweets from the people that you are following.  It’s nice to note that you will ONLY see things from people that you follow (and anything they retweet), so you won’t be bombarded by a lot of tweets… unless you’re following a lot of chatty people.

Tip: You can change your background image, profile photo, and privacy info by clicking on the Settings button in the top right corner.

Step 7: Now that we’ve set up our twitter account, we can start tweeting Zazzle products. You can tweet a product that you’ve just created, and/or a product in the marketplace you really like.

• Tweeting marketplace products: Find a Zazzle product you really like, and below the product you’ll see a “Share this” section.  If you click on the Twitter button (2^nd button in), it will connect right to your twitter account… so long as you’re logged in. It puts in a default message that you can change if you’re feeling creative, or you can leave it as is.

• Tweeting products you’ve created: After you’ve created a product and hit “publish,” you will be on the all too familiar “Congrats” page.  Once there, you can click on the “Copy-and-paste code” link under Paste your product on your own site.  Click on the “Twitter this” tab, enter your user info and a snazzy message (or select a preset one), and hit send.  There is also a way to do this automatically through TwitterFeed, read more about that here.

Step 8: Now Tweet… tweet my pretties!!! Also, be sure to share ways that you use Twitter to promote your Zazzle store in the comments below, or hey, tweet them (be sure to include #SellerWed in your tweet, so we can track your responses)!

Note:  Hash tags, or the # sign, are used before relevant search terms on twitter.  So every Seller Wednesday, I include #SellerWed in my tweets so I can track and see who retweets my message, or if I’m running a contest – who wants to win.  That way if you were to type SellerWed into the search bar on Twitter, it would come up with all the recent tweets with the #SellerWed tag.   You can easily use this when tweeting about a product you created; ex. “I just created this awesome Father’s Day Tie! #FathersDay #FathersDayGifts”

This entry was posted on June 16, 2010 at 10:58 am and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.