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Every Tuesday, the Volusion team will be posting quick educational videos to help you further succeed online. Today’s episode teaches you some basic ways to better integrate your ecommerce site with social media efforts.

Happy Tuesday! Hope you’re having a great build-up before the Labor Day holiday here in the US. Since you’re already online finalizing your vacation plans, why not take two minutes to learn how to align social media with your ecommerce site? It’s all pretty basic – figure out what you want to do and stick with it.

If there are any topics that you’d like covered in future videos, feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email directly at matthew_winn(at)volusion(dot)com.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist, Volusion

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Here’s the transcript:

Hi everybody. My name is Matt and I’m an Online Communications Specialist here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. Today we’re going to address a hot topic in ecommerce, and that’s how to integrate social media with your online store. It’s really spreading like wildfire – everywhere you look you see Twitter and Facebook popping up, so we really want to help you out to ensure that you’re making the most of it as far as your time is concerned.

First, you’ll want to set your objectives. Far too many small business owners go online to pick up a Facebook and Twitter account without knowing what to do with it. So you’ll want to figure out what you want to do with the time you’re investing. Do you want to increase sales? Build a community? Establish thought leadership? Figure out what your overarching objective is, then figure out tactics to help reach that objective.

Next, start with your blog. Your blog is SEO gold and will serve as the base of your overall social media strategy. You’ll want to post articles that are pertinent to your business, whether it’s innovative events, developments you’ve seen, or anything of interest to your readers. From that, you’ll have fresh content for SEO and content to post on your Facebook and Twitter pages. Thus, your blog is extremely important to drive traffic to your site, so start there.

Next, choose your channels wisely. Far too many people go out there and get a YouTube account, a Flickr account, a StumbleUpon, a Digg – the whole nine yards. Instead, figure out what you have time to manage and what you can continue to manage in the future. Some of the most basic channels are Facebook and Twitter, so if that’s all you have time for, cool. If you have a lot of online videos out there, start with YouTube and YouTube only. So start with what you’re comfortable with, but don’t get too deep; otherwise you’ll drown under the proverbial water.

Now, establish some metrics. You want to see how you’re actually performing instead of just shooting numbers in the dark. You can measure how many Twitter followers you have, how many references you’re getting, how much traffic you’re getting to your site from your blog and whether or not that’s leading to more sales or newsletter signups.  Just have something tangible to measure so you can go through and make adjustments.

With that in mind, you’ll want to keep at it. Far too many users get started strong and feel great about it. But two weeks later, they stop updating their blog, their Facebook account, or whatever channel they’re utilizing. Thus, make sure that whatever you choose is sustainable, because it does take time to build your community and your search engine rankings. Just keep at it and realize the benefits will come.

Hopefully this was helpful in getting your social media strategy started. As always, from me to you, happy selling!