# is social networking the answer?



## bazkazoo (Nov 19, 2012)

I have nearly 2000 likes on my facebook page! but how do i turn potential customers into consumers? Bazkazoo


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## KabirC (Aug 29, 2011)

bazkazoo said:


> I have nearly 2000 likes on my facebook page! but how do i turn potential customers into consumers? Bazkazoo


Have sales every once in a while and things like that, post exclusive offers for FB only. Are those 2,000 actual people that are targeted and like your brand or just likes that you bought?


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## bazkazoo (Nov 19, 2012)

Hi, 

No I didn't buy the likes, didn't even know that was possible! Do you have any ideas on how to change those likes into sales? Thank you for your reply


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## printingray (Apr 4, 2012)

This is not enough to get sales, try to do other ways of online marketing as well if you want good sales as well branding.


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## sweetts (Apr 4, 2010)

I look at it as Facebook is for them to get to know you, but old fashion marketing gets sales


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## bazkazoo (Nov 19, 2012)

Thanks for your opinion 👍What would you consider old fashioned marketing?


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## sweetts (Apr 4, 2010)

Well if your looking for local work go to networking events, visit businesses let them know who you are. Join the chamber of commerce, get involved with community events. Donate time to charities. Cold calls hit up the schools donate some shirts to give out at school events. You know the good stuff. If you more web based email push to everyone, offer coupons ( can do local too) call all past customers give them prizes for referrals or have a referral contest.


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## bazkazoo (Nov 19, 2012)

Great advice sweetts feeling highlyotivated now! 👕💕


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## bazkazoo (Nov 19, 2012)

#highly motivated


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## sweetts (Apr 4, 2010)

Great!!! It's a grind but you have to sell to print. What about you print up some New Years shirts a design on front your info on back give them to local bars and restaurants use it like a business card ir Local rec centers, donate some tees with a sweet design for the workers and volunteers I bet you get at least one solid print job from it. You want each job to get you one more job. The big thing just ask for what you want.


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## Preston (Mar 21, 2006)

The age old saying in sales is "People buy from Friends" and this is still true today. The big thing to realize is that Facebook "Friends" are not really friends and "Likes" do not mean they like you.

Facebook is exactly what it is classified as, "Social Media". Think of it like being at a big conference at lunch time. A lot of people there, you meet a few and you each tell each other what you do, shot the breeze. You may make a few friends and they may buy from you later but the biggest majority of the people there will never even remember you. The more actual friends you make, the more potential customers you may have. That is Facebook.

Make actual friends on Facebook by socializing and then keep directing them to your website to entice them to buy.


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## specifikreazon7 (Dec 14, 2009)

me personally with my site FBGS - Fresh Baked Goods Clothing 
I used to have a facebook page but gave up on that with the spam epidemic. 
However I do have a twitter with about 1.6 k followers and growing. I also try to talk to friends
and tell them to tell there friends about which is a BIG help seeing is how locally my brand is getting buzz.
I pass out business cards to people who I think may be interested ( of course after starting a conversation with them) word of mouth does alot.


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## mattybear (Jun 8, 2012)

bazkazoo said:


> I have nearly 2000 likes on my facebook page! but how do i turn potential customers into consumers? Bazkazoo


People see a button and they push it without thought sometimes. I would suggest engaging them, make them feel special now you have their attention. Offer people who like your page discounts and prize giveaways etc.

Matt
http://deadmanvalley.com/


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## nomadprintfrance (Mar 19, 2010)

I personally started my business only with facebook advertising ( not paying) after 2 years starting from scratch i shipped 1000 orders and its better and better.
Nomad-wear.com


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## bazkazoo (Nov 19, 2012)

Nomad-wear.com what's your secret? What's your Facebook page called?


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## kidder (Mar 7, 2006)

You will only put in what you get out, like anything in life. If you haven't got time to update and leave comments for people on Facebook, then leave it. Nothing worse than seeing a FB page that hasn't been updated in 6 months. 

You can howerver use social media to spread your message and branding. Get people commenting on photos and uploads, videos on how you come up with your designs? Exclusive offers to FB friends, the list is endless and only limited to your own imagination.


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## Naptime (May 19, 2011)

social networking is not the answer..

it's merely one piece of the puzzle.

you really need to attack marketing from all directions.

website, social networking, social couponing, local door-to-door, print, media, etc..


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## nomadprintfrance (Mar 19, 2010)

just search nomad-wear and u must find me in facebook


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## DREWBOOGIE (Aug 14, 2009)

Facebook is great but it can also be dangerous. Social Networking is a great tool but you can't solely rely on Social Networking to get sales. 

Nothing beats hitting the pavement. Getting out there. Handing out promotional items. Slapping stickers everywhere. Get your brand seen in a tangible aspect rather than a virtual one. Get pins made & give them away. Same with stickers.

Instagr.am is a great tool since you can really get a crazy amount of followers & the attention you want but if you're putting 10 hours a day in social networking you should be doubling that on the street & actually talking to people. 

Best way to start, in my opinion, is to get family & friends to buy your stuff. Get them involved as well. Let them help you get to where you want to be. Most of all, don't stop pushing!


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## Preston (Mar 21, 2006)

nomadprintfrance said:


> I personally started my business only with facebook advertising ( not paying) after 2 years starting from scratch i shipped 1000 orders and its better and better.
> Nomad-wear.com


Not to knock the wind out of you but 1000 orders in two years is not a very good result. A 1000 orders a year is not very good. But I guess it is ok for free. I personally do not consider "good" until you are shipping 1 to 2 thousand per month.


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## bazkazoo (Nov 19, 2012)

Preston how long have you been in business?


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## Preston (Mar 21, 2006)

bazkazoo said:


> Preston - what's the key to your success?


The key to my success is I am not a clothing line company but a contract printing and industry software development company.

But to give you an example I turned down a 80,000 piece a year customer about a month or so ago. When you get to those numbers you know you doing it right.

Now I am not knocking clothing line companies nor am I trying to knock anyone here or those trying to make it in that business but I have seen literally thousands of clothing line companies/people start-up and then fail within a year or two. The main reason I think is not the designs but the amount off effort they put into what they do. The old saying was and still is "It takes money to make money". If you are going to take the free route then that money needs to be in the form of your sweat spending hours upon hours pounding those free marketing avenues.

Now here is something I would like everyone to think about. What form of advertising "paid and free" out performs any other type of advertising there is? And you can even use this form of advertising on Facebook for free. Think about that and I will give the answer in a day or so.


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## ukracer (Feb 11, 2010)

All of that if fine but so many people are starting up the pie is smaller. The recession is biting and starting up money is scarce.

From my point of view being retired and having a severely disabled wife I would not want a full time business selling 1 to 2000 per month. I just could not cope. However 2000 a year looks very inviting. lol


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## ukracer (Feb 11, 2010)

Preston said:


> Now here is something I would like everyone to think about. What form of advertising "paid and free" out performs any other type of advertising there is? And you can even use this form of advertising on Facebook for free. Think about that and I will give the answer in a day or so.


Word of mouth??


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## pbk! (Apr 5, 2009)

Nomad-wears secret is that his prints are designed by world renowned and very popular artists who each have a large fan base of their own. Their popularity exponentially increases the amount of traffic his page will receive. 

I do agree with whoever said it...2000 units sold in 2 years isn't anything to get excited about. Nothing to turn your nose too, I'd be happy with it, but you can't quit the day job with those numbers.

There are some really good threads about the inefficacy of social networks to generate sales. Same goes for Google Adwords. Look it up. 

From what I have researched, you can expect to convert 1 out of every 1k visitors to your site.

Nothing is better than getting out there, face to face with your target market, a good presentation, and a little bit of chit chat with perhaps a free sticker or lollipop to put a cherry on it.

Keep on hustling...


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## Preston (Mar 21, 2006)

ukracer said:


> Word of mouth??


 While a very good form of advertising it is not the best performing method. You still want it though. As long as it is good.

The thing with word of mouth is if the customer is happy they will tell maybe 10 people. If they had a bad experience with you they will tell 100 people.


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## Gecko Signs NT (Aug 3, 2012)

You know what we did today? We set up a tent out the front of our workplace complex, hung some tshirts up and sat there. We saw about 200 vehicles go by. They all looked. We even saw some drive past 3 or 4 times on their way to doing whatever it is they do. Out of that 200, we had 2 people stop and ask us what we were doing. So we told them.........."We are getting our name out there". We weren't expecting sales. We were there to get people to notice us. Put a seed in there head and let it grow.
And we will do the same thing, next week and the week after and the week after that. People need to see us. People need to see what we do and what we make. And I read somewhere that people will start to trust after theyve seen you about 7-10 times in the same place


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## PIMAKING (Aug 13, 2010)

I recommend you work with independent sales representatives.

thanks


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## Riderz Ready (Sep 18, 2008)

Preston said:


> But to give you an example I turned down a 80,000 piece a year customer about a month or so ago. When you get to those numbers you know you doing it right.


Nothing personal but turning down a 80,000 piece deal is not doing anything right. Getting an 80,000 piece deal and making a profit is doing something right.

Another personal opinion - I would never purchase a business solution that choses to describe their product as "cheap".


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## Daddyof4 (Aug 23, 2011)

We have a children's clothing business on Facebook. We started it up back in March of 2011. Since then we accumulated over 16,000 fans which has cost us about $5,000 in ad fees over the past 18 months. We have sales on FB usually at least once per day. This worked out wonderfully from about June until the timeline nonsense was started in October of 2011. 

At that time Mark Zuckerberg decided that he needed more revenue so he changed the way we appear in people's newsfeeds. Up until that time we had about 10,000 fans and we were spending $50 a week on ads. And at that time all 10,000 fans saw our sales. And we made about $25,000 in sales on FB from June til December. 

The timeline changes had built in that in order to stay in the fan's newsfeeds we had to be constantly interacting with them. This meant if a fan wasn't buying, liking, or sharing your stuff the program would assume they weren't as interested in our stuff and we would slowly drop off their newsfeeds so basically we lost a fan unless they actively/purposefully came back to our page. Our sales dropped off as soon as that happened. We were still selling but not as much. Instead of all our fans seeing our sales now about 20% saw them on a good night. And this was with us posting giveaways and other means to keep people interested. It went from personal interaction to FB page becoming a beast that constantly needs feeding.

Zuckerberg's motive in the timeline changes was his mistaken ploy to make us pay even more for fans that we already paid for. How? by offering us the grand opportunity to "promote our posts". Business page owners now had a tab that if they click on it a drop down menu appears that lists the option to promote that one post to varying numbers of your existing fans for a fee. The problem is the fee started at $5 just to reach a few hundred up to $200 to reach all 10,000 fans. If we listed 20 pictures of items for sale then we would have had to pay upwards of $4,000 for one night. Not possible and absurd at any level. I don't know of a single business paying this idiotic fee. His ploy is crashing and burning just like his stocks.

Then at some point in recent couple of months he changed it again and it is even harder to stay in their newsfeeds. Now we are lucky if 3% see our posts. Instead of 16,000 each picture shows that about 300-500 see the posts. There's other factors involved such as the "Talking about us" statistic which we've found has very little effect on who sees our posts. Sales have plummeted and most businesses are moving away from Facebook sales including us. Zuckerberg is an arrogant little man who, while certainly innovative in his stolen idea, he doesn't understand or refuses to acknowledge that businesses not only will not pay these new fees but that we are no longer going to pay to advertise on there. 

We now spend about $10 a week on FB (soon to be none) and have redirected our advertising dollars to Etsy which is starting to pay off.

What Facebook should have done was say "Hey we will give you back your fans but in order to keep ourselves financially viable we would like each business to pay a modest monthly fee ($50-$100). And maybe if your fans reach 100,000 then the fee might go to $300 or something like that. But he obviously has no clue about business whatsoever and FB is going to go the way of Myspace pretty quickly as far as businesses are concerned.

In short, don't waste your money on Facebook. Unless the company starts a customer service department and unless Zuckerberg relents and embraces small business instead of alienating us his revenue ploy can be summed up with a resounding sound of a car backfiring.


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## Ruimpress (Sep 15, 2011)

I am with you don't waste your money on FB

Sent from my SPH-L710 using T-Shirt Forums


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## Preston (Mar 21, 2006)

Riderz Ready said:


> Nothing personal but turning down a 80,000 piece deal is not doing anything right. Getting an 80,000 piece deal and making a profit is doing something right.
> 
> Another personal opinion - I would never purchase a business solution that choses to describe their product as "cheap".



You read it wrong. I was saying the customer I turned down was doing something right to be selling 80,000 units a year. Me turning it down was the right decision for us as it would have put a strain on us taking care of our base customers. We currently do around 180,000 pieces a year for our base line customers and it just did not make sense to me to take on another 80k pieces from one customer. Now I would take on another 80k pieces if it were from 3 or 4 customers. Next time I will refer them to you so you can add $60,000 worth of equipment to ramp up for one customer.


Known fact. "Cheap" out sells "Inexpensive" and "Free" out sell them all. Why do you think so many people are trying to use Facebook for "Free" advertising? I do have a solution that is "Not Cheap" but the one we sell as "Cheap" sells more copies because it fits the needs of the new startups who do not have a lot of "Not Cheap" cash in their pockets. I guess I could change it to "Low Cost" which is another way of saying "Cheap". Thanks for the tip..


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## evnetwork (Jul 18, 2011)

sweetts said:


> Well if your looking for local work go to networking events, visit businesses let them know who you are. Join the chamber of commerce, get involved with community events. Donate time to charities. Cold calls hit up the schools donate some shirts to give out at school events. You know the good stuff. If you more web based email push to everyone, offer coupons ( can do local too) call all past customers give them prizes for referrals or have a referral contest.


This is incredibly good advice.
There's been a lot of backslash on social media marketing, people are starting to realize that it's a bit of a tricky thing to deal with.

Media like facebook, twitter and similar networking sites are for people to get to know your brand or to gather information on your company and the way you do business.

Bottom line: none of these tools will sell your products. If you want to get something out of them, you need to consider them only as channels like others to interact with people (not just simply spamming links), that could get you some customers.


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## Daddyof4 (Aug 23, 2011)

evnetwork said:


> This is incredibly good advice.
> There's been a lot of backslash on social media marketing, people are starting to realize that it's a bit of a tricky thing to deal with.
> 
> Media like facebook, twitter and similar networking sites are for people to get to know your brand or to gather information on your company and the way you do business.
> ...


Well the problem is that Facebook WAS a great selling tool for my wife's children's boutique. She has a store, a website, Etsy, and a FB page. She sold $45,000 on Facebook in the past 12 months but due to changes in the Timeline her FB sales are almost gone. So while FB is awful as a selling tool now it was a great one only six months ago and even better before October 2011. It also depends on the type of business. 

I do believe Etsy is a rock and will only get better.


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## canvenconsulting (Dec 12, 2012)

I myself selling t-shirts to people all over the world just with an account and business page on Facebook and Twitter. I am using strategy of linking with page with similar pages with more customers through personal request and also running ad on my page and other partner pages.


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## Daddyof4 (Aug 23, 2011)

canvenconsulting said:


> I myself selling t-shirts to people all over the world just with an account and business page on Facebook and Twitter. I am using strategy of linking with page with similar pages with more customers through personal request and also running ad on my page and other partner pages.


We've run the gambit of getting customers to share, linking pages, etc. and spent thousands of dollars over the past year and a half to acquire our current 16,000 fans. We will continue to sell on FB. But we realize that FB's attack on small business through ill conceived and failed money making venues like the promote your post feature will ultimately force small business to abandon it. It will also force small businesses to look for the next big thing to replace FB. Could be a positive thing if some "big thing" reveals itself that will compete with FB and force even the uber conceited Mark Zuckerberg to learn even a marginal bit of knowledge on how to make money in a way that is affordable and realistic for his customers.


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