Does social media really work to promote business?

[jamesbulls]

This is the link you’re looking for: http://forum.fiverr.com/discussion/how-i-use-social-media-to-market-my-fiverr-gigs/

There’s still some good stuff here: http://forum.fiverr.com/discussion/37-detailed-tips-to-optimize-your-gigs-and-start-selling-today/

And I recently added this bit about the importance of a business policy: http://forum.fiverr.com/discussion/how-to-remove-negative-reviews-and-ratings-tips/

But to answer your question, my answer is still mostly the same as it was before: Fiverr’s analytics are quite poor, so it’s difficult to know where all my traffic is coming from. After I take out all my repeat clients, I think probably half my sales are coming from outside of Fiverr. Generally speaking, my sales have gone up since I wrote the original post, so I’m getting more internal sales just from being ranked high in search results, but it’s still true that when I take time off from blogging, YouTube-ing, and Google+'ing my sales diminish. Everybody thinks that marketing with social media is a breeze, but it’s really time consuming. It works, but it’s time consuming.

[eoinfinnegan]

Yes, the first one was the one I was thinking about. I remembered the content (and author), just haven’t applied it yet.
I think there is hugely valuable info in that post that all sellers could learn from. It is an example of social media marketing done correctly. It’s supposed to be social and that’s what you do. No selling, just you being you, talking about what you love doing and letting people check it out if they are interested.
Your other posts are just as full of excellent info and it’s a shame they aren’t pinned any more.
Thanks for taking the time to dig them out, I just thought it would help on this thread as the OP represents the views and experience of the vast majority or people who have tried “social media marketing”.

[magellon]

You shouldn’t put everybody in the same basket @voiceoverfun, one of my Twitter accounts has over 100,000 followers, I NEVER ever buy followers as I know that they will have 95% fake accounts, therefore, useless (I use a program to report that). I have been collecting followers since 2009 and regularly ¨clean¨ my lists, which means that before following someone I can quickly see that, first he/she has a photo, how many followers versus followings they have and how many tweets they have already posted. Then, about once a week I systematically remove followers that didn´t follow me back, that have not been active for more than 2 weeks. My ¨Fake/Inactivity percentage¨ is always 6% or less which is extremely good considering that it includes people that have not tweeted recently but are still real people. It is very difficult to have such ratio although one of my Twitter accounts with over 31,000 followers has only 2% ¨Fake/Inactivity¨, now that´s a record, and I have no idea how I succeeded that.

So, of course I promote my Fiverr Gigs on all of my Twitter accounts and I am quite sure that most of my sales come from that (I am also participating in many other social networks (FB, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, etc…) I don´t do other form of promotions anymore as I am satisfied with the results I have.

Also, it is interesting to see that Fiverr also include ¨Social Gig Views¨ in the stats made available to us, and they encourage us to share our Gigs on FB, Twitter, G+ and linkedIn by displaying the buttons to make it easy for us, so there must be a good reason for that.