A friend of mine recently asked if I had some kind of marketing firm helping with our “online presence”. I laughed a bit when I first heard the question and thought, “Are you kidding me?”, until I started to think about it some more. Between the main store front website, the blog, the facebook page, and our twitter account PiX Eyewear actually has a pretty decent online presence; especially considering the company only consists of three employees; all of whom work on it part time. I won’t lie: it takes a bit of work to keep all of this up, but it’s not nearly as involved as it sounds.
Store Website
As I mentioned in my previous post, we use Shopify to create, maintain, and host our store website. They have loads of layout templates you can choose from and it really didn’t take much effort to have a professional looking and functional online store front.
PiX Eyewear Blog
While I don’t post to it as often as I should, I do maintain a blog on the PiX store website in addition to this blog. Shopify comes with the ability to easily add blogs to your store, so once again this was “point-and-click” simple to get started on. The blog functionality they offer is fairly rudimentary, but in my opinion it’s “good enough” for posting quick articles about the goings on of the company. These articles are great things to post about on the facebook and twitter page.
If you had asked me several months ago what kind of role I thought facebook might play in the development of my online business I probably would have answered, “little to none”. As it turns out I would have been dead wrong. Facebook is playing an enormous role in the development of this business in a couple of different ways. I have plans for a future post about how we’re leveraging facebook advertising (and why I consider it better than Google Adwords in some ways), but for now I’ll focus on our PiX Eyewear facebook page.
I’m not entirely sure how facebook “fan pages” evolved over time, but in their current form they’re essentially a way to create a facebook profile for an organization as opposed to an individual. These profiles have a wall that you and others can post to, photo albums, a discussion board, and a number of other features designed to help you interact with other facebook users on behalf of the organization. Forbes.com recently posted a great article describing the process of creating a facebook page for your business that sums up the process far better than I ever could.
More and more businesses are using twitter as a way to interact with current and potential customers. I don’t think I need to go into the “why” of having a twitter account for an online business. It’s free to setup, easy to use, and I think it’s a pretty decent medium for keeping in touch with customers.
Bringing It All Together
It would be a lot of work to keep a blog, facebook profile, and twitter account updated on a regular basis, which is why I cheat a bit. On any given week I’ll typically do something like this:
- Write a blog post on the store front blog. This post doesn’t necessarily have to be very long and is often quite short.
- Post to the PiX Eyewear facebook profile about the new blog post, inviting the people who follow us there to read it.
- An application automatically posts whatever I put on the PiX Eyewear facebook wall to the PiX Eyewear twitter account.
- Once or twice a week I’ll also add a picture to facebook of a new style that we’re just created. This also gets cross posted to twitter.
That’s it. I spend a few hours a week on this and maintain what I consider a pretty impressive looking online presence for the business that I run in my spare time.
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