Social Media, haven’t got time, it doesn’t sell anything, show me the money and I might be interested – all comments I’ve heard recently as excuses not to use Social Media to market your eBay selling activity.
eBay have been testing selling with Social Media as a pilot with eight sellers who committed to spending 30 minutes per day marketing their products. Whilst this is a tiny pilot the results are pretty encouraging. Whether they’d work for you is another question, it may be highly dependent on category, your abilities and even your photography skills.
There are some interesting techniques shared, such as using a URL shortening tool such as bit.ly. By posting links to your eBay items as a specific shortened URL you can use tools such as eBay’s Traffic Reports to measure success from that URL.
There are any number of Social Networks that you can use, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Pinterest, YouTube etc and the first thing to realise is that you undoubtedly don’t have time to use them all. However there are some which are less time consuming than others for instance Pinterest.
It takes mere seconds to Pin an image and Pinterest is highly suitable for categories such as collectables. Pinterest is even easier to use if you’re the type of seller who lists similar items at the same time. It enables you to create multiple boards and Pin the days listings on the relevant board along with any videos or blog posts on the same subject.
You don’t have to create all of the content yourself either, if you’re researching a particular item you’ll find information about it on other websites which you can also Pin along with images of similar products.
eBay have created a Social Media Best Practices guide. Whilst it’s intended to give advice in driving traffic to your eBay listings there’s absolutely nothing to stop you using the same methods to drive traffic to your own website.
