Social Media Marketing

For a boutique apparel and accessories retailer such as Apricot Lane Peoria (ALP), building a community of fans, and ultimately converting those fans into customers, is a top challenge. With a limited brick-and-mortar presence and a modest digital advertising budget, getting brand recognition was a concern for ALP. Enter Facebook.

Outdoor gear and apparel retailer Rock/Creek Outfitters used Twitter's Lead Generation Cards in a Promoted Tweet campaign last year to capture the email addresses of people who entered a drawing to win a free pair of Chaco sandals.

Reddit has "soft banned" Etsy links due to what the site says is a recent rise of spam posts by apparently overeager sellers who don't follow Reddit's rules when promoting their listings on its site. Reddit is an irreverent social networking site where people make posts, often with links to news, humor and politics, and users comment and vote the posts up or down. Etsy sellers have been discussing the benefits of posting on Reddit over the past few months. You can find posts on Etsy discussion boards written by sellers who discover traffic coming to their listings from Reddit.

In a world increasingly filtered through Instagram, a carefully crafted photo shoot starts to look dated. That's why retailers are rushing to crowdsource their product shots, harvesting a stream of photos from social platforms to help sell everything from West Elm couches to Coach handbags. The photos are typically curated in galleries, where each picture is linked to a page selling the product. Increasingly, the amateur images are also showing up directly on product pages, next to professionally styled pictures.

At least one Wal-Mart store had so much extra inventory left over after the holidays that it had to use its outdoor center for storage, according to a Vine video shot by a financial analyst. Brian Sozzi, CEO and chief equities strategist at Belus Capital Advisors, took two Vine videos at five Wal-Mart stores in the Northeast. The first shows an outdoor center used to store surplus items, including big-screen TVs and Campbell's Soup in the wake of the holiday season.

You're probably not interested in the details of our home improvement nightmare. Before getting to the marketing point, some background will help showcase how Lowe's Twitter team truly believes in its corporate mission and understands how to use social media to grow its business.

In a unique holiday move, Best Buy will host a shoppable Google+ hangout on "Last Minute Deals" tonight. For those who don't know, a Google+ hangout is a video chat done through the Google+ social networking website. It enables up to 10 people to interact and share documents, images and videos with each other, and it can be broadcast for others to view. People who RSVP for Best Buy's hangout will be able to watch a group of tech enthusiasts talk about last-minute gift ideas. And they'll even be able to shop for the products as they're being discussed. 

This has been one tough year for Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F). A megaviral "Abercrombie-Hates-Fat-People" meme started in May when a Business Insider piece analyzed Abercrombie's marketing practices and included a seven-year-old quotation from CEO Mike Jeffries. The piece then piled on with comments from a retail consultant with no connection to the company who explained that A&F didn't sell plus-sizes because Jeffries didn't want overweight people wearing his clothes. Social media outrage ensued, and a YouTube urging consumers to donate their Abercrombie clothes to homeless people for a "brand readjustment" garnered more than 8 million views.

The holiday shopping season is here. And I'm not just talking about those obnoxious pre-Thanksgiving Christmas decorations. I'm talking about your customers, who are flocking to the visual web (see Pinterest and Instagram) to prep holiday season wish lists and find gift inspiration. Have you made your list of how to best optimize your digital efforts for those customers, but not yet checked it twice? Don't worry, there's still time! Here are three ways retailers can visually ensure their products are at the top of consumers’ wish lists during this holiday season:

The Wet Seal announced a partnership with AwesomenessTV on a reality series, "The Intern." AwesomenessTV, one of the most subscribed to video destinations for teens on YouTube, debuted the series on Nov. 25 and will air four weekly installments throughout the month of December. The Intern, a series created exclusively for Wet Seal, has the brand's corporate headquarters as its backdrop, and episodes follow the experience of two interns during their time with the company. The series begins with the interview selection process, and each installment thereafter features challenges for the interns, who aspire to a future in fashion.