We recently made a big change to our auto-posting program for Twitter and we're quite happy with the results. You may want to do the same.
We came into this new system quite by accident when one of our auto-posting vendors, Meet Edgar, expanded their services to include RSS feeds and significantly more social media accounts. Suddenly we were paying two vendors that could both post RSS feeds to Twitter. We decided to move our feeds from Twibble over to Edgar.
Our old Twitter auto-posting system was like everyone else's . . . set up an RSS feed with a posting vendor, add some hash tags to the end of the posting template and let it Tweet our most popular products every few hours.
From our bit.ly reports we could see that we were getting a few clicks on many of the Tweets and were reasonably happy with that click through rate. What we didn't like was that many of the products being posted were not the ones selling in the Zazzle MarketPlace even though we set up our RSS feed to select the most popular products based on a 30 day time frame. Further, there were almost always room for 50 or more characters (Out of 140) in each Tweet.
Initially, we had planned to simply duplicate everything from Twibble over to Edgar and then delete the feeds at Twibble. But as we learned more about Edgar's new services, we realized there were significant differences in their RSS feed system and that generated several new ideas.
Edgar is different that most other auto-posting systems. You create libraries of content and then schedule them to post by day and time. Edgar randomly selects content from the libraries taking into account when and how many times that content has previously been posted. For example, if you had 90 items in your library, Edgar would post all 90 according to the schedule. Only after everything has been posted one time does it start to repost content a second time. With 90 items, it would take three months before there are any duplicate posts (Assuming you were only posting once per day).
Edgar's library system allows you to edit and delete content. So our first step was to have the RSS feeds load content into the appropriate library, an iPhone 6 case library for example. We then deleted the content for products that really were not popular, keeping the content for those cases that have sold or that had a considerable number of views (Our definition of popular).
Posting only those products that met our definition of popular improved our click through rate as there were fewer products with no clicks at all.
Despite this improvement, it occurred to us that it was still a kind of hit or miss system. If someone liked the design and were in the market for a phone case, they might click the link. But what about those that are in the market but are not attracted by that particular design? By definition, this is a much larger group of people.
Having a link for these people in our Tweets is where we really started to see an increase in our click throughs. We edited each of the Tweets in our libraries to include a second link that simply said "See more iPhone 6 cases". The bit.ly link that followed took people to our iPhone 6 category in our Zazzle store.
The numbers are impressive. Thus far in February, we've had 70 clicks on the iPhone 6 cases that were presented in the Tweets. But we had 41 clicks on our "See more" link. A 59% increase in click throughs. Our iPhone 7 case Tweets had 28 product clicks and 16 "See more" clicks for a 57% increase. The results are similar across all of our Zazzle auto-Tweets and also in our auto-Facebook posts.
We came into this new system quite by accident when one of our auto-posting vendors, Meet Edgar, expanded their services to include RSS feeds and significantly more social media accounts. Suddenly we were paying two vendors that could both post RSS feeds to Twitter. We decided to move our feeds from Twibble over to Edgar.
Our old Twitter auto-posting system was like everyone else's . . . set up an RSS feed with a posting vendor, add some hash tags to the end of the posting template and let it Tweet our most popular products every few hours.
From our bit.ly reports we could see that we were getting a few clicks on many of the Tweets and were reasonably happy with that click through rate. What we didn't like was that many of the products being posted were not the ones selling in the Zazzle MarketPlace even though we set up our RSS feed to select the most popular products based on a 30 day time frame. Further, there were almost always room for 50 or more characters (Out of 140) in each Tweet.
Initially, we had planned to simply duplicate everything from Twibble over to Edgar and then delete the feeds at Twibble. But as we learned more about Edgar's new services, we realized there were significant differences in their RSS feed system and that generated several new ideas.
Edgar is different that most other auto-posting systems. You create libraries of content and then schedule them to post by day and time. Edgar randomly selects content from the libraries taking into account when and how many times that content has previously been posted. For example, if you had 90 items in your library, Edgar would post all 90 according to the schedule. Only after everything has been posted one time does it start to repost content a second time. With 90 items, it would take three months before there are any duplicate posts (Assuming you were only posting once per day).
Edgar's library system allows you to edit and delete content. So our first step was to have the RSS feeds load content into the appropriate library, an iPhone 6 case library for example. We then deleted the content for products that really were not popular, keeping the content for those cases that have sold or that had a considerable number of views (Our definition of popular).
Posting only those products that met our definition of popular improved our click through rate as there were fewer products with no clicks at all.
Despite this improvement, it occurred to us that it was still a kind of hit or miss system. If someone liked the design and were in the market for a phone case, they might click the link. But what about those that are in the market but are not attracted by that particular design? By definition, this is a much larger group of people.
Having a link for these people in our Tweets is where we really started to see an increase in our click throughs. We edited each of the Tweets in our libraries to include a second link that simply said "See more iPhone 6 cases". The bit.ly link that followed took people to our iPhone 6 category in our Zazzle store.
The numbers are impressive. Thus far in February, we've had 70 clicks on the iPhone 6 cases that were presented in the Tweets. But we had 41 clicks on our "See more" link. A 59% increase in click throughs. Our iPhone 7 case Tweets had 28 product clicks and 16 "See more" clicks for a 57% increase. The results are similar across all of our Zazzle auto-Tweets and also in our auto-Facebook posts.
A traditional RSS feed post.
A Tweet via Edgar with "See more" link added.
The key to this superior system is being able to edit your content to include the second link, something that few posting vendors provide. So check with your provider. However, you can use this tactic when you are Tweeting and posting from a Zazzle product page. Simply set up a list of your text and links so you can copy and paste when you are posting.
For more marketing and promotion ideas for your Zazzle products, learn more about our newest eBook The Comprehensive Guide to Marketing and Promoting your Zazzle Products.
For more marketing and promotion ideas for your Zazzle products, learn more about our newest eBook The Comprehensive Guide to Marketing and Promoting your Zazzle Products.
RSS Feed
