I recently started an online boutique shopfatbelly.com because I was interested in learning how to own and operate a business. After choosing the niche that I would be working in, I began experimenting with how to find new customers. After spending a lot of time looking at other successful companies in the domain that I work in I decided to focus on social media marketing.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are the four social media sites that I choose to focus on getting customers from because they are all sites that I am familiar with and sites where I follow influencers who’ve inspired me to purchase items they raved about.
The first site I choose to begin experimenting with is Instagram, I purchased some ads and while the ads got a lot of traction they didn’t lead to any sales. Also people visiting my site from Instagram would usually only spend anywhere from 10–30 seconds on the site before they closed out. I also hired an influencer to post my product on Instagram. While the influencer has close to 30,000 followers only 60 of her followers visited my site and there were no purchases made. While I will continue to post items to Instagram that are new and available on the site I won’t be purchasing any more ads for the time being.
The biggest fail of them all, which I honestly should have seen coming was Twitter. Twitter ads start at $50, with the other sites I was able to purchase ads in much smaller increments and then expand as I saw traction with the ads. I am an avid Twitter user and I hate seeing ads on the platform. I rarely ever click on them and I usually ignore them, scrolling right past them and wishing they weren’t on my perfectly curated timeline. It’s obvious I’m not the only Twitter user who feels this way. Going forward I will not be purchasing ads on Twitter but I am open to hiring Twitter Influencers. While scouting for Influencers to hire I learned that Twitter users are much more engaged than Instagram users.
My next experiment was with Facebook, I heavily underestimated the power of my own friends and family while using Facebook. For a long time I didn’t tell my friends or family about my site because I wanted to organically grow my following but once I asked my friends and family on Facebook to view my site I had over 20 visitors to the site in one day. I also purchased ads with Facebook and saw incredible results. While $50 on Twitter lead to 0 size visits and barely any engagement $50 on Facebook lead to over 500 site visits in one month and my site being in the top 15% of sites launched on the same week as mine on Shopify.
My final experiment was with Pinterest. Prior to purchasing ads on Pinterest my account had a couple dozen monthly viewers and no followers. While I still don’t have any followers on Pinterest my account now has 20–30 thousands monthly viewers, so when I post a product on Pinterest there is always a ton of traffic to my site.
I’m still not seeing the level of sales that I would like to so what that tells me is I need to do a rehab of my site. I need to work on having better product photos and descriptions then I will post some more ads this time I’ll only be purchasing ads from Facebook and Pinterest while I try to increase engagement on all of the sites.
