Useful tools for the Etsian - Twitter

Welcome to the first blog post in the Hearts and Hands United blog!

I'm Linda - a.k.a. marlan - a fairly new seller on Etsy and one of the admins of this blog.

On the HHU group we've been talking a bit about the many different tools one can use to promote oneself. It's really a jungle out there with all them tools, so I wanted to kick open this blog with some tips on how I use different tools to promote my shop on the internet.

One of the first things I learned when I got onto Etsy was that building relations within and outside the Etsy community is really important. So once you got it all set in the shop up and running it's time to haul in some visitors.

First of all get yourself a Twitter account. Via Twitter you can easily connect to other Etsians and other people interested in your shop. For example, you can post your new listings to Twitter and instantly get a lot more visitors and potential customers to your shop than you would have if you hadn't.
Keep in mind that Twitter is for shorter messages and this means that each message can contain no more than 140 characters.

When choosing a username it's good to use your shop name, to avoid confusing your future followers. I myself haven't done so, since I' already had my Twitter account for a year and out of laziness didn't want to create a new one. This leads me to another important thing about changing usernames.

It is possible to change usernames on Twitter but your followers don't get automatically updated about this, it might get very confusing for them. Of course you can tell all your followers that you've changed your username and hope that all your followers get this message. If your new to Twitter this is fairly easy done, since you probably don't have that many followers yet.

Since your user name also is your address (http://twitter.com/old_username), make sure you replace your old Twitter address with the new one (http://twitter.com/new_username) where needed. These old links will not be working once you've changed username.

Once all the above is settled, spread your twitter address all over the place. Follow people and be followed. Tweet about whatever comes to mind: everyday life, your crafts, your shop. The more you tweet, the more people see you and the more followers you get.

But be careful - by only tweeting links to your shop thirty times a day can be considered annoying and people might lose interest in you.

Once you get a hang of it, Twitter is a great tool for promotion and to get in contact with people all over the world.

If you need further information on how to set up a Twitter account you can watch a good tutorial here.

And of course - The HHU Blog Members are always here to answer questions or help out with whatever we can.
Next time we'll guide you through how to create a Facebook Fan Page and good things to keep in mind while doing this.
Until then - take care.