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In this episode of Two Minute Tuesdays, Matt Winn from Volusion discusses 5 great ways to use Social Media tools to boost your sales during the Holiday season. From announcing existing promos to sampling from Groupon, these tips will help your online business take advantage of social media during this record-breaking holiday season.

Happy holidays! We’re reaching the final stretch of the selling rush for your online business, and if we’ve learned anything so far from this incredible year for holiday ecommerce, it’s that discounts and social media are playing a huge role in attracting sales. Most likely, you’re offering special promotions to your customers and making a name for yourself on social, but are you blending the two for maximum return? It’s a lot easier than you might think.

Take a quick break from your day to check out this holiday edition of Two Minute Tuesday, where I discuss blending your strategies for social media and discounts (all while wearing a Santa hat). Pay special attention to tips #3 and #4, as they’ll help boost your efforts well into 2011.

As always, if you have any questions, just leave a comment below.

Happy holiday selling!
-Matt Winn, Volusion

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Here’s the transcript if you’d like to read along:

Hi everybody! My name is Matt and I’m an Online Communications Specialist here at Volusion. Welcome to this holiday edition of Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. Our friends from Practical Ecommerce recently wrote an article saying that 4.39% of Black Friday traffic for the top 500 retail sites came directly from social media. And with this record-breaking ecommerce season, you’ll want to use these tips to leverage your social media outlets to boost conversions on your ecommerce site.

First and foremost, announce your existing promotions on social media. If you’re announcing a 10% discount on your homepage, why not announce it on your social media channels as well? Simple enough, it will help boost conversions there.

Next, reward your fans and followers and offer exclusive discounts on your social media sites. If these customers are already getting marketing messages from you, you might as well make them feel like they’re in an exclusive club? This is a great way to grow community by offering these socially exclusive discounts.

Third, you can sample from Groupon’s playbook. The great thing about social media is that you don’t have to make an entire site update to make an announcement. Thus, if you do a deal of the day, or a deal of the hour even, you’ll create a sense of urgency behind your promos, and you’ll encourage people to pay more attention on social, which will help build your fan base once word gets out.

Next, give rewards to people that share your deals. For example, if you’re running a discount on Product B, and you tell your customers to share this with 2 or 3 other people to get an extra discount, they will do so since people turn to social for discounts. So encourage sharing, that’s what it’s all about, and you can get more conversions from social media here as well.

And finally, simply bribe your customers to follow you. There’s nothing wrong with it – if you have a callout on your homepage to receive a discount for following you or “liking” you on Facebook, it’s a great way to build your fan base. And the beauty of all this is that you’re not just getting a short-term boost in your social channels for the holidays, you’re also gaining a long-term investment in social that will grow well into the new year.

Hopefully this was helpful in blending your holiday ecommerce with your social media activities. If you have any questions, we’re happy to help. From me to you, happy selling!