twitter tips for handmade businesses - don't spam

If you are new to Daft, we have an ongoing Twitter Tips for Handmade Businesses series. Read the previous installments here. Today's tip is about advertising on Twitter - without spamming your followers.

The goal of utilizing Twitter to market your business is to make your followers want to click through and visit your shop. Here are some things that you want to avoid and tips to tweet better.

Nobody wants to "check out" your listing.

"Check out this listing by me on Etsy/Storenv/Artfire/etc" or such tweets is a huge no-no. In a recent Tweet-up, 100% of participants said they never, ever click on tweets that start with 'check out', 'look at', 'new products listed at' and so on. Not just a handful of people, 100% of the participants said this was a sure-fire way to not get their business on Twitter. Tweet better. Engage your followers with sweet tweets that describe the product and it's uses, and add a picture if you have room after your description and link.
Example: 


More than one shop tweet an hour is too much.

When you are doing  promo tweets, space them out. There are few things that make someone less likely to buy from you than having ten or more tweets in a row promoting items from your shop choking up their Twitter feed. This also tends to make people unfollow you, limiting you audience. Maybe you post several items at once because you're tight on time. There's a solution for that -  Use a scheduler like Tweetdeck or HootSuite to schedule shop tweets to post every few hours. This frees up time to create and actually engage on Twitter rather than posting every product in your shop at once, and it will make those shop tweets have more of an impact and put them in front of more eyes, which is the goal of any advertising campaign.

Never, ever tweet someone you don't know and ask them to check out your shop.

I have started seeing this more and more on Twitter and it's a really terrible practice. Not only is it rude {and no one is going to click a link from a stranger so it's a total waste of time} but it can also get you banned for spamming. If you want to get your shop tweets in front of more people, review our previous post on utilizing hashtags

Don't private message every new follower a link to your shop.

Rather, send them a public tweet thanking them for following you, and ask them how they are doing. Engage with them publicly and their audience will see them engaging with you and perhaps follow you, growing your audience. Check out new follower's profiles, and if you find an opportunity to mention your shop, great! If not, don't shove it down their throat. They followed you on Twitter, your shop tweets will appear in their feed, so they will notice you talking about your shop without you having to directly ask them to look at your shop. 

If you take the time to tweet creative, engaging content - you won't need to spam your followers to get shop views! Just maintain a positive interactive social media campaign! 

Bonus tip - Try asking a question in your shop tweets! Just listed a new purse? Ask your followers what they think of fabric combo! New art print? Ask your followers what it reminds them of! Give them a reason to click your shop links!

Do you have any Twitter pet peeves?

7 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for this post. You've pointed out just about all of my Twitter pet peeves as a potential customer. As a business, I've 'followed the leader' with other shops that I think are successful and engaging. Which tweets inspire me to click? The ones that give enough info to be interesting, but leave me wanting to know more. I've -never- clicked on a 'Check out'.

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  2. Wow! I'm green at tweeting :/ made all of those in one day~oooppppssss Thank you for your knowledge and sharing with me!

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  3. Great reminder that genuineness and engagement are always the way to go :-)

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  4. p.s. super great information, as usual! i think i'll tweet this one...haha.

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  5. These are great tips & reminders! I think sometimes I get lazy and make the "check out" tweet from time to time. :( Thanks for the insight that it pays off to think before you tweet ;)

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  6. Great tips, when promoting new products I do normally start with ***new products*** and I have in the past started with 'check out....' which both I thought were attention grabbing but I can see it would be better to engage users with description of the product.

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  7. repetitive tweeting drive my nuts -- it reminds me of a parrot -- not a good way to engage.

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