Hey Fairy Cardmaker,
I remember when Christine (aka PillowThrowDecor ) was against Twitter. She finally was convinced by others to give it a try, and I think she is very glad now that she did. Here is one of her posts on how Twitter worked for her.
https://icraftgifts.com/forum/1104/twitter-quick-list/I am not saying that Twitter and other social media sites work for everyone, but there are definite benefits of using those sites for promoting your business. At a minimum, you could register Twitter and Facebook accounts and feed automatic product updates to them. We provide this functionality, as part of your profile.
From my own experience and from looking at web analytics data for iCraft, I can say that you can get additional 10-20% of free traffic in a relatively short period of time from those sites. Our traffic from Twitter and Facebook alone went up by 15% within the last year. And if you think those visits don’t result in sale, that’s not true.
Here is one example. I posted this product photo from thebeadedlily to our Facebook page yesterday
http://www.facebook.com/icraftca#!/photo.php?fbid=490770817021&set=a.86014352021.79960.7670217021, and today she sold 5 products – see 5 last jewelry items on the Last Sold page
https://icraftgifts.com/handmade/last-sold/ I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Twitter brought some sales too. Bounce rate for Twitter on our site (according to GA) is at 44% with the average 3.07 number of pages viewed for 2:24 mins. That’s not bad actually. This means that only 44% of people, who come to iCraft from Twitter, leave our site after seeing only one page. Other 56% stick around and check out more than one page.
According to a 2009 survey by Gartner rereplacement firm "More shoppers turn to Facebook, Twitter for buying advice" -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38417017/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/. And I think this is just the beginning. Canadians already surf web, watch YouTube, consult Wikipedia more than any other users -
http://yhoo.it/g9NYFv With the widespread adoption of mobile devices, social media sites will be used even more often.
Anyway, just wanted to share this with you.