Last-Minute Tips To Generate More Leads To Sell More In Amazon/eBay This Holiday Season!

It’s exactly just few days left for Holiday season.  Still many of the eBay and Amazon sellers or other small business owners are striving hard to drive more sales.  According to the Ponemon Institute, a full third of holiday shoppers plan to spend more money online than in-store in 2011. Therefore you need to spend more time in promoting your business online to attract your local and global audience.

We at OBVA would like to share Last-Minute Tips how to sell something on eBay/Amazon  this holiday season:

Spread Your Offers In Social Media:

Promote your ads/offers using paid advertising campaigns in Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to entice more visitors. Attractive offers like Buy two get one free, bonus gifts for every purchase etc..can boost more sales. Also, Flash news about one time offers like “Barbie dolls with gift wrapped for free shipping only today”, Foundation creams with Free shipping for first 20 international customers”  will turn you customers to click the buy buttons. You may not have time to involve in such creative and attractive offers to your customers. Delegate such tasks to Virtual Assistants quickly to end your deals.

Word Of Mouth Spreading Through Referral Marketing:

Once you come with attractive offers, encourage your customers to be your walking advertisements. This with no doubt can increase your sales.  Implementing this will not only increase your sales but would maintain a high volume selling in the coming year 2011.  “Refer your friends and get 20% discount on your next purchase can increase your sales” or ” Share it to your friends and get a free gift coupon today!” can get you high ending sales volume. Here are  Top 3 Tips To Convert Your New Customers To Repeat Customers  that might help you.

Mobile And Email Marketing:

According to a recent research it has  been estimated that more than 420 million smart phones will be selling in this year 2011. Hence make use of this effectively, by sending message alerts with special offers and discounts to your customers may change their buying mood to your store. Email marketing is another best way to promote your business with great offers. More than one-third of online shoppers say they would not make a purchase without a free shipping offer. Hence make this is a subject to increase your selling. Here are few Tips To Encourage Your Customers Share Your Amazon/Ebay Business .

Though many store owners may be enticing their customer with more offers, stand out of the crowd by making your offers clear, focused and easy to understand.  Your offers should be clean, brief, to the point and should turn any customer to click on buy buttons. If you do have time to write such exclusive offers, you can hire experts to quickly generate more leads. Here are few “ Holiday Selling Tips That No Seller Will Share With You” which you can use to increase your sales. No matter if it is too late to choose your Virtual Assistant, delegating to experts always help. Happy Selling!

2 Great Offers Rolled Out By eBay For Powersellers– Sell More On eBay This Holiday Season!

If you are looking for information on How To Sell Something On eBay, then you are at the right blog!

Discount offer #1 announced by eBay:

On Dec 1^st eBay announced  that “All PowerSellers: Save up to 32% on USPS shipping this holiday season” This program offers Commercial Plus™ Pricing—savings of up to 32% off of retail pricing—when you pay for postage and print labels from eBay Labels. If you haven’t signed up yet, enrollment is easy—you can do so the next time you use eBay Labels.  eBay Top-rated sellers and Platinum or Titanium PowerSellers qualify for this discount year-round.

Who are Powersellers? eBay’s “Powersellers” are a group of sellers who are distinguished by the amount of volume they produce in online sales. These Powersellers are the very small group of eBay sellers that do at least $2,000 per month in sales on eBay and maintain a 99% positive feedback rating. If you want to know more about how to become one, here is a post on “Top 10 Secrets That You Should Know To Become A Powerseller.”

Discount offer #2 announced by eBay:

Another discount that eBay announced for the holidays is the 20% Final Value Fee discount, which is just one more way to save!

During holidays everyone is willing to do more business and get more profit.  Apart from making the most of each offer, a seller should also concentrate on how to write effective listing, take good care of customers, maintain positive feedback and claims, etc. You may need to do huge volume of listing, packing and shipping each month, you may consider delegating the tasks to eBay virtual assistants who can help you do the tasks for in time. You can then concentrate more on important aspects of your business and monitor the whole show.

During holiday season, one aspect that needs utmost attention from eBay sellers is feedback. Try to avoid these “7 customer service mistakes that can result in a negative feedback.” Always try to resolve the issue by contacting the buyer on time. Here is “eBay Feedback Revision Tip” that can help you get your feedback revised.

Once the shipping labels are printed, eBay sends automated emails to your customers. You can add wishes like “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year” to add to the customer experience.

We will certainly keep you posted with more news and offers from eBay and Amazon. You can subscribe to our blog RSS here, like us on Facebook,+1 on Google and friend us on Twitter, and we would love to interact with you more often. If you are thinking of delegating your store, check out our performance reports from eBay/Amazon clients here. We offer completely customized eBay store and Amazon store services.

One More Solid Reason To Add More Listings This November – By OBVA eBay Experts

Like every year, eBay holiday offers are being rolled out. The offers are innovative, and focused at helping sellers encash more sales during the holidays. It is upto you how much you can make best use of the offers.

Recently, there was an announcement by Todd Lutwak, Vice President of Seller Experience recently  “One day only! On November 29, list up to 1,000 items Auction-style for free. Add Buy It Now for free, too!  This one-day only promotion applies to all sellers. If you have missed out this offer, you missed out something, but remember to stay tuned for more upcoming offers. If you really want to make the most of this holiday season , you have to stay tuned to the latest news and updates so that you can make the most out of this holiday offers. Here are some useful  Holiday Selling Tips That No Seller Will Share With You!

To start with, you should be prepared for more offers to come. How to get started?

Track your listing time:

You can create your listings at your convenience and control the time they start and end. eBay gives sellers the option of listing items for 1,3 or other days as per your choice. Any auction listing will end the same time the day it is supposed to end. When you list your items,  remember to apply the best listing ending time as per visitors traffic.

Optimize your listing endings smartly:

Your BIN listings and auction listings must end during a time when there are more visitors at eBay.  There is a general assumption that auctions that end on Sunday will have more bids. You can read “How to make your ebay auctions more effective” to know more on auction timings. Also, if your auction listings live for longer, you will get more bids. So, more chances of getting a good selling price for your product.

Your listing must be properly optimized for look, feel and SEO:

Start thinking as a potential customer and try and figure out how they are going to be searching for your item or your store. If you want your store or listing to show up when the customers search for it, make it keyword optimized. The right keyword can earn you first page in search and if you want it to be done in a professional way give the task to internet research experts who can give you good results. eBay tool  “eBay Research Labs BayEstimator” can be used here or the perfectly optimized eBay title. Here is a post  by eBay virtual assistants which gives “The Steps To Get High Search Engine Ranking Optimization For Your eBay Listings“.

Distribute the listing well using Social Media:

Recently Facebook introduced Tagging of photos for Fanpage. This means that you can create a listing, add your product image on your fan page and then tag those pictures with your fan page. You can use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin to promote your listings. Here are some of posts that can guide you. ‘Use of Facebook for eBay/Amazon’, ‘Use of LinkedIn for eBay/Amazon, and ‘Use of Twitter for eBay/Amazon.’ And also there are some of the applications that can be used to promote your eBay business such as 6 Facebook Applications Which Can Be Used for eBay/Amazon Business and 5 Twitter Applications That Can Be Used for eBay/Amazon Business. If you choose to automate your listings, then “Turbo Lister – Top eBay Marketing Tool “is a good tool to start with. However, it is always wise to have a person look through the listings done automatically, to review any errors, etc.

To create an effective listing you may need professionals help so delegate it to eBay virtual assistants who are experts in creating it for you. You should  have a team in place for all regular activities so that customers are taken care of in the busy season. A few negative feedbacks may spoil your chances of faring well during holiday season. So, why take a chance? Delegate your routine store tasks to professionals who can work with minimum supervision, so that you can focus on more sales this year end. Happy Holiday Selling to you!

Holiday Selling Tips That No Seller Will Share With You! Sell All The More Stuff On Amazon This Holiday Season

As you know, all malls are overcrowded during these months for Thanksgiving and then Christmas shopping. The big online mall, Amazon is no exception to this. Do you want to learn tips on how to sell all the more this holiday season? If yes, read on while we discuss what works! You can trust our tips because Amazon Virtual Assistants at OBVA have been working on client Amazon stores for years and we love to share what we learn while doing what we love to do, managing online stores.

Attract Customers By Offering Great Deals

Why should customers choose you over your competition? This is the question that should pop up in your head every time you plan to write a new listing this holiday season.. Offering your customers  freebies (like a free sample or a free gift coupon, etc.) is a great way to make them open your listing page and then press the BUY Button. Also, if you can publish your best offers on Social Media sites, you can make the offer spread through the network. If you are not using Social Media for promoting your listings, then you may read “ List Of 7 Killer Posts – ‘eBay And Amazon Social Media Marketing“. Also, I am adding a whole list of posts on Social Media Marketing for eBay  at the bottom of this post. Do not forget to read through them before you market your next listings.

Before you market, make sure that your offer is very attractive for prospective buyers. Apart from Social Media, you can also get the word out through e-mails, blog posts, and tweets. If you have a Fanpage for your store, you can post your offer listings on the wall.  You can post updates on your fan page that create anticipation for an upcoming offer. If you follow Facebook announcements recently for free advertisement for small businesses in 2012. Here is a post from Under30CEO  “ Will Free Facebook Ads Help Your Business?” which analyzes the free ads of Facebook. You will notice how effectively they have created anticipation already.

You can also make use of One Day, One Deal sites like Woot which  has been acquired by Amazon. This sites offer a new item offer every single day. So make use of sites like these to attract more customers

Read the recent announcements(if any) from Amazon

Okay. You have a great product to sell. You are ready with the price and everything and then suddenly you get a bad surprise. Amazon doesn’t allow you sell that product. After all the hard work and preparation, this news won’t be pleasant for you, I guarantee and then you would so much wish you read the recent announcements before putting in so much of efforts and hardwork. For example, if you are a toy seller, it will be wise to read through “Holiday Selling Guidelines in Toys & Games” before anything else. There are some categories requiring approval. So it is wise to do a good quality Internet Amazon Market Research before diving into the market.

Focus on writing an attractive yet genuine ad

The most important step in writing an ad is to get reader’s attention with a strong opening which should make your customers read the entire ad and get to know about the offers which you are going to give them.  You have to create desire for your product by stating a problem and showing your product to be the solution. You can work on the images and write your offer in an attractive way to encourage visitors click on your listings. For example, FREE SHIPPING,BUY 1 GET 1, and so on. Nowadays, listings consist of demo videos where the product features are nicely showcased. A simple video too can make your listing more useful for the buyers. You can create a few images and listings for the same product and experiment. Stick with the ones that do the best. Daily deals and lightning deals are game-changers during this period because they create a sense of urgency and everyone is particularly price sensitive during the holidays. So make sure you offer a great price for the items and attract as many customers to your webstore as possible. Give them value for money and they will leave you a positive feedback for sure.

In this post, we discussed on listing part, in my upcoming posts, I will share with you more on next post will discuss on how to keep  your seller account secure, how to do great customer service during holidays, and how to handle post order problems. Grab our RSS feed for more information on Holiday Sales. Follow us on Twitter and Like us on our Fanpage to get more updates regarding Amazon business.

As per per promise, here is a list of Social Media Marketing related training posts:-

Post 1 – How eBay and Amazon Businesses can use Facebook for promoting their online stores.

Post 2 – How Linkedin can be effectively used for eBay and Amazon Businesses

Post 3 – How eBay and Amazon Businesses can use Twitter for promoting eBay and Amazon Businesses

Post 4 – 6 Facebook applications that can be used for eBay and Amazon Businesses

Post 5 – Avoid these 7 Customer mistakes that can result in negative feedback

Post 6 – Top 5 Effective Twitter applications that can be used for eBay and Amazon Businesses

Post 7 – 5 Linkedin Applications that can be used for eBay and Amazon Businesses

Do not forget to share your comments.

Part 7 – Here is A Top eBay Marketing Tool “Deal Finder” – By eBay Virtual Assistants At OBVA

eBay Virtual Assistants at OBVA are sharing the best of eBay marketing tools like Turbo Lister, Terapeak, eBay listing analytics, Selling Manager,BayEstimator, Bay Research Labs BayEstimator, based on what we use for our client store.

Today the tool we have chosen is eBay’s Deal Finder

What is Deal Finder:

Every savvy shopper does a little comparison while shopping. To make sure that  holiday season to be a great one sellers can start using the tool eBay Deal Finder . According to eBay Deal Finder is “To truly find the best deals, we built Deal Finder to compare the current selling price of an item on eBay to the lowest price we can find for the same item”.

Features of Deal Finder:

We can just set the price limit and then search for the item you want using categories and keywords. Not all items found on eBay.com are displayed in Deal Finder. For an item to be displayed in Deal Finder it must meet the keyword and category constraints as well as have zero bids, no reserve price, less than four hours left, free or fixed rate shipping and a total price that is below the selected criteria. Make sure that you choose the right keywords of your store. If you have any difficulty in doing it delegate the task to professionals. eBay will display items that meet your criteria, with those closing soonest at the top.

Sellers can find this tool very helpful for sourcing bargain items that have been overlooked for some reason. Any seller’s items can appear on Deal Finder. The only requirement is that the item meets the keyword and category.

The opportunity to buy items cheaply and resell them for a profit is huge. You can also find out about wholesale lots which is much cheaper. Just type ‘wholesale’ or ‘lot’ into the search bar and get the answers. Its that simple.

Limitations:

There are few limitation for this tool. Such as

• No Shipping Prices are included while searching.
• Doesn’t include Third Party Sellers rates.
• Sometimes, the eBay Deal finder does comparisons on products that are not exactly the same.

Deal Finder is very efficient at what it does do. It will be interesting to see whether eBay makes further changes to it in the future. Have you started using this tool? Then we would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with Deal Finder. You can join us in our  Facebook Fan Page, Follow us on Twitter or leave some comments on how this tool has helped you. We appreciate your feedback.

Part 1 – Turbo Lister – Top eBay Marketing Tool Series Post By eBay VirtualAssistants At OBVA

eBay Specialized Virtual Assistants at OBVA understand very well how difficult can eBay marketing be, when you don’t know the exact process to follow, tools to use, and what works what doesn’t. Therefore, we are always keen to share some useful posts which can help you better market your store while you start using useful eBay selling tips to become a top-rated eBay seller .

In today’s post, we would like to introduce the top effective tools that you can use for better marketing of your store.

Here the list goes….

Part 1-  Turbo Lister -Marketing tool for eBay

What is Turbo Lister:

According to eBay Turbo Lister “Turbo Lister is a FREE listing tool to help you create professional-looking listings and upload thousands of items in bulk. Try the new eBay Turbo Lister, the next generation listing tool.” It does speed up the auction listing process and can store auction templates with all the category details. This is a tool that can be used offline to prepare as many items for sale as you want. You can add items into it whenever you are free and can upload them all in one batch. When you know which time the listing gets more bid, you can plan your listings accordingly. So, this tool can be a real powersaver if you are managing your eBay store yourself. And, if you are good at delegating your routine tasks, like listing your item, this tool can help your VA save lot of time they spent on listing. If your VA is an experienced eBay store manager, then you may not need to worry at all.

Features of Turbo Lister:

• Free and very easy to use
• Turbo lister can be used online or offline, in both the ways.
• You can upload about 1000 items within 15 to 20 minutes with one click.
• You can preview the ads before you go live on eBay.
• During special promo sale, you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars in listing fees!
• A copy of the auction remains with TL and contains all of the listing information such as categories, postage etc.
• You can add a free photo using the eBay photo service

Few limitations for Turbo Lister:

• Your ID and password in TL and eBay must be the same as this information is used when then listings are uploaded to eBay.
• While using TL, sometimes catching errors occurs while uploading due to shipping issues or other reasons and listing as to be started from scratch, which is frustrating.

Turbo Lister is an efficient program that lets you create and track all your eBay listings. You can  list items individually or you can bulk upload into Turbo Lister for selling on eBay.It is a great tool, but then it’s a tool, which needs human monitoring to make sure that the tool is doing its job without errors. We use Turbo Lister for our client store listings and monitor each listing once its live to ensure the tool has not made in errors. If you are doing all your eBay tasks alone, without delegating, chances are you are not getting enough time to think on ways to increase your product portfolio, do cross selling, and to get your customers come back to you again. We recommend delegating for better business. In the upcoming posts, we will share more tools which can make your eBay selling easy. You can grab our RSS feed for the latest updates. You can like our Facebook Fanpage and follow us on Twitter  and Google+ to make sure you don’t miss out on the posts.

7 Customer Service Mistakes That Can Get You Negative/Neutral Feedback In Amazon/Ebay Business

In online business platforms like Amazon and eBay, we can resolve our customers’ concerns through email support and voice support. For any type of business, customers are the asset. Hence it is very important to keep customers happy because if they are satisfied with service, they will become walking advertisements for your business. And we all know how effective word of mouth publicity is!

When customer concern is not resolved properly and promptly, they tend to leave Negative/Neutral Feedback at your eBay and Amazon store. The eBay Virtual Assistants and Amazon Virtual Assistants at OBVA have been handling client stores for years. We manage store feedback and send follow up emails to customers to work out a solution so that the feedback score is above 99%. Great customer service is what makes you a successful seller at eBay or an Amazon topseller.

From our experience, we share the 7 most common customer service mistakes that get you Negative/Neutral Feedback.

Mistake #1. Failure To Listen:

Usually, the biggest mistake a customer service representative for any business can make is not listening to the customer attentively. It is important that you listen to the customer first. That mean you have to read the customer’s email with great attention and find out the problem that he/she is facing. By being attentive to your customer, you gain their confidence that you are there to take care of their issues. When you fail to listen to your buyers, they feel neglected and then obviously leave negative/ neutral feedback at your online store.

Mistake #2. Failure In Leaving Emails Unresponded:

It is important to maintain the TAT ( Turn Around Time)  while responding your customer’s queries.  When you are not sure about the solution or if you need to get approval from your superiors before offering solution, you need to request the customer for a specific time, example, 24 hours, 48 hours, etc.. You may be working on the solution but if you do not let the customer know about this, they will feel that you are ignoring their email and then may leave a feedback. If not, at least their attitude towards you/your store will get negative. So, it is smarter to let the customer know that you are working on the solution and how much time you need to get back to her.  This would give them a confidence that their issue is being taken care of and will be resolved quickly.

Mistake #3. Failing To Keep Your Promises:

At times, to get a sale, many sellers make some promises which are not kept later. This is a huge mistake that any seller can commit. If you make a promise, keep it by any means. Therefore, you must think many times before committing something to a prospective customer or a existing customer.

This leads to a negative feedback most of the times. It creates negative attitude towards your brand/store. So, only make promises that you can fulfill.

Mistake #4. Failing To Bend Over Your Rules:

Rules are meant to run any business effectively. They are important. However, customers are the people who make your business run. So they are most important assets for any business. Follow rules. But, do not over follow them to an extent that you are not at all flexible to help out a customer. And in an online store environment like Amazon, eBay, the feedback left by customers can be seen by anyone. If you have unsatisfied customers, it will show up on your store profile. For example, you ship a product by First Class always as per your company policy. One of your customers may want it quickly. Then, you must try to ship it by Priority mail if possible. Your customer will remember your effort and will become a repeat customer. Who doesn’t want loyal customers?

Mistake #5. Inaccessibility:

If you are supporting your customers either by email or voice support, make sure that you are accessible. Before or after making the purchase, the customer might need to contact your store for any clarification or information. Give your contact email/phone on your store profile so that they know when to contact whom and by when they can expect a response. This creates a trustworthy business relationship. If you are not accessible for your customers, their next step would be filing claims and/or negative feedback.  When you are accessible by your customers, your store will find its way to their favorite list and they would come back to you often.

Mistake #6.  Failing To Follow The Fundamental Email Procedures:

Most of the cases, when we take over a online store, we can see that there are lots of negative/neutral feedback due to customer service flaws. Clearly defined customer service policy is important. Clearly defined FAQ is important. Return policy is a must. But, most the of the store owners are too busy doing too many things on their own and don’t have time for the most important aspect of business, customer service. Simple things make a lot of difference. Thank your customers for their business. Apologize immediately for any inconvenience. It costs nothing to write a nice polite email but gets you tons of reputation. 101 email etiquette tips has a nice list of 101 tips that you can read through once for reference.

Mistake #7. Failing To Hire Professionals:

To follow the basic and important rules of customer service, first you have to make sure you have the right kind of customer service professionals in your team who can write pleasant, courteous, and polite emails to your valuable customers. You need a person who is working on emails as per your TAT( Turn Around Time) and is dedicated to what he/she is doing so that you do not have to worry about customer service, claims, feedbacks, replacement and refunds anymore. Trained professionals experienced in managing customer service feedback for ebay and amazon businesses can work on your customer service right away with minimal training on your product and business policy. Make sure you hire professionals who work for their clients to consistently maintain 100% positive feedback. We at OBVA would like share our prove performance reports in managing 100% positive feedback for our eBay and Amazon clients.

Mashable has shared “6 Tips for Providing Better Online Customer Support” which can increase customer satisfaction levels. Good customer service can not only help you get positive feedback for your store, but can also turn your customers as long term buyers.  Hire trained Customer Service Professionals today so that you no longer have to worry about un-responded emails. OBVA can help you in creating FAQ, Return Policy, and Customer Service Policy to start with effective outsourcing for lower costs and better business.

Part 3- 5 Effective Ways To Promote Your eBay and Amazon Business Using Twitter

In our last blog posts, Virtual Assistants from OBVA shared “Part 1 – 7 Powerful Ways eBay Sellers Can Use Facebook” ,“Part 2-5 Ways eBay Sellers Can Use LinkedIn ”, on how eBay and Amazon sellers can use Facebook and LinkedIn profiles for better promoting their listings, marketing and for SEO of their listings to become successful sellers. OBVA online store expert virtual assistants now share how an online store owner can use Twitter for effective marketing of their online store. Twitter is a great and extremely fast way to disseminate any kind of information, be it personal or business. You can use commenting on Twitter effectively for establishing yourself as an expert in your industry.

Here are some proven ways to promote your eBay and Amazon business using Twitter-

1. Follow influential people from your industry on Twitter

You can follow others in eBay or Amazon business, people who are working in these companies, or their thought leaders. “Communicate with them” Following a good‐sized community can be valuable and fun! Mashable has written a blog post on “10 Ways to Find People on Twitter” which shares useful search engines and tools to help you search amazing twitter people to follow in your business. Another useful blog post came from Mashable on “Google Helps You Find People to Follow on Twitter” on how you can use Google to search people to follow on Twitter. Then I also came across an interesting blog post by Social Media Examiner on “5 Ways to Use Twitter to Connect With Local Customers.”  If you are a local business owner, this post will make lot of sense for you. When we do local SEO for or clients, we use a lot of tips from this article.

We searched ‘eBay’ on tweepz and got many profiles who have something to do with eBay. PLUS, we also got valuable information like number of followers, following, updates, etc.

2. Get people to follow you

Following people and receiving their updates is great, but you need people to follow you back and receive your updates too. Make sure that your Twitter username is easy to find. If it is personal name, it helps people to get to know the person behind the company/brand you tweet about. Personal faces are better in Social Media than just logos behind a brand name. It is obvious that your tweets must be resourceful for others so that others get value by following you. And then, finally, you must interact with people on your twitter. When you post your listings, follow the communications happening around it.

3. Use Twitter for marketing

Twitter can be effectively used to drive people to your online store. Have you recently updated an interesting offer on your eBay listing? Share it! Talk about it! Spread the enthusiasm about your great offer. It is important that you monitor what people are saying about your store on Twitter. Use Twitter Search tool , to know what people are saying about your store listings and products, competitors or any other hot words in your industry. You can use Twitter hashtags to sell your products as it would greatly increase traffic to your site. You can store all your positive feedback and testimonials on twitter favorites. Tweet‐ups are a great way to get to know your Twitter community offline. The next time your store offers any new listings or give away product, tweet about it!

4. Use Twitter for customer service

Respond to concerns people tweet about your store or listings. Delegate this responsibility to either one of your employee, or to a social media virtual assistants (available starting $10/hr only). Respond to feedbacks, give feedback and help customers solve their products in real time. If there is any temporary problem with shipping, etc, you can inform people using twitter.Your customers will be appreciative that your store is trying its best to relieve the problem. Personally thank everyone for following your store on twitter rather than sending automated messaged.

5. Use the following applications effectively

Twitter has a whole world of available support applications you can utilize to gain the most of the service for your business. Here’s a few:

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension to view your followers, for @replies, update your status,etc. You can keep track on what people are saying about your listing updates using this tool.

TwitterAnalyzer gives you in-depth analytics of your Twitter experience, like number of tweets per day, popularity, reach, links, and more. This one will help you understand which link updates and offers are popular and which are not. Learn from it!
TweetLater: Use this schedule your listings update or join a conversation or track topics/trends.

Ping.fm: Use this to post your best listings in all social media sites at once.

Twitter for Facebook: Use this to link your Facebook with twitter, if you want to. However, I don’t suggest that. Because, Twitter can digest many many updates in a day, but Facebook cannot.

As you can now understand, Twitter can be used to promote your stores and listings in an effective way. As a store owner in eBay or Amazon you would like to target the customers who will be following you. There is a fair amount of potential to gain new customers to your store , but it depends on how you promote or sell your store on Twitter.  The process can be time consuming most of the times, but you have an option of delegating your work to professionals who can help you save time and still get your social media going. If you have the time, you can do your own social media. If you have any question regarding using twitter for your online business, drop us an email. Join us on twitter today!

The next post will be “5 Effective Ways To Promote Your eBay and Amazon Business using Digg”. Grab our RSS feed so that you do not miss the information you need.

OBVA Coming Up With A Series Of Blog Posts On “How eBay and Amazon Sellers Can Use Social Media Sites Effectively”

Social media sites are considered to be a virtual place to express your voice or have some fun. For the enterprising ones, social media sites could mean serious business. This is the place where business owners can get connected with potential customers.

As a business owner you probably do not have to talk the right people but the good news is, they will still “hear” you. This is where social media sites come for your help. You would be amazed at the powerful connections that social media sites have. All it takes is a click and you could probably be publishing a very valuable piece of information for your prospective customers. For online stores at eBay and Amazon, Social Media Sites can be used to promote store and listings effectively. We have been promoting online stores for our clients for a long time. Using our experience, eBay and Amazon expert virtual assistants have come up with a Series Of Useful Result Oriented Blog Posts on ““How eBay and Amazon Sellers Can Use Social Media Sites Effectively”

What you can expect from this upcoming blog post series?

1. Useful tips on how eBay sellers can use Facebook and its applications

2. How Amazon Sellers can use Facebook and its applications

3. How eBay  and Amazon sellers can use Twitter, Linked in, Digg, and MySpace for marketing and promoting their stores and listings

4. The different useful applications for promoting your online stores

5. Which site best suits your purpose of using Social Media for your online store

6.  Tips for implementation

The analysis is based on Communication, Brand exposure and Traffic targets for your online store.

Make sure that you grab the RSS feeds to keep yourself updated on the powerful result oriented content from the eBay Virtual Assistants and Amazon Virtual Assistants who work day and night on managing client stores for better sales and feedback ratings. You can also friend us on Facebook and Twitter today for regular updates on your walls. See you this Wednesday with “Part 1 – 7 Powerful Ways eBay Sellers Can Use Facebook for Promoting Their Stores and Listings.” Again, grab the RSS feeds so that you do not miss on the information you need!

Facebook Now Allows Fan Page Tagging On Photos…What It Means For Brands?

This Sunday, when you upload your Saturday night dinner party pictures, you can now tag the restaurant page where you dined out!

Starting today, Facebook allows tagging Fan Pages on photos like tagging friends’ profile. This feature will help people share more about the brands, businesses, etc. they interact with in the real world. Anyone can tag the photos in the photo-viewer, not just profiles who liked the page. Social Media Professionals find this feature as a great branding tool for businesses and professionals using social media.

How to tag pages?

According to Facebook, it is similar to how we used to Tag Your Friends Pictures. Click the photo you wish to tag and then type the name of the page you wish to tag. You can tag a single photo with multiple pages. Once done, simply click ‘Done Tagging’ in the bottom left corner.

What about privacy?

Facebook assures that privacy policy settings will still apply. A page admin can disable the photos from appearing in the photos tab by simply un-checking “users can add photos”. Photo published for everyone becomes visible in the photos tag of the page, whereas photos tagged for friends becomes visible only to the friends of the tagger.

What’s in it for brands?

Certainly, this feature is going to add a boost to branding on Facebook. Someone wearing an Adidas t-shirt can tag the brand on his photo and thus it will get free advertising for the brand. Also, services can be tagged likewise. When you upload your last night dinner party picture, you can tag the restaurant in the picture along with tagging your friends. Got a new haircut that you like? Can tag the salon in your picture! Business professionals can now tag the event, conferences they have attended. Possibilities are endless. Companies can run campaigns to tag their pages for some gifts or free offers.

However, negative publicity is also likely to happen as people will have more freedom to tag and express their opinion about a brand on Facebook. For example, if one gets a bad product and is not satisfied with it, he can simply add the picture and tag it with comments. If this tagging goes viral, it will result in negative word of mouth publicity for the brand. There is a limitation to the amount of tagging-tracking that any brand can do to protect its reputation. Thus, the implications can be both sides, and it depends on the brand a lot on how it goes about interacting with its stakeholders online and how prompt is their social media team to respond in real time.

As each new feature adds in the influential social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc., branding and marketing opportunities will increase and with this will increase the needed time commitment for active real time reputation management and monitoring. Small businesses will need professional help (professional social media assistant) to make the best use of the social media sites for promoting their local and online businesses.  Addition of new features and applications in Social Media adds to the many reasons why one may need to take professional help in Social Media. As the feature goes live, the immediate reactions will define how brands make the best use of this feature. Let’s wait and watch!