Social eCommerce

Author: Stephan Spencer, Jimmy Harding & Jennifer Sheahan
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 310
ISBN: 978-1449366360
Print:1449366368
Kindle: B00MC03B0W
Audience: Online marketeers
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

This isn't a book on programming; it's about using social media as part of your business strategy to increase sales.

Being savvy about social media is a necessary part of many tech roles, and this is a book about how to do that part of your job better, and to achieve better results.

The authors work through a set of goals looking at how you can use social media to achieve outcomes such as increasing sales by a specific percentage.

The book opens with an interesting foreward by Jeremy Schoemaker, a blogger who was voted the most influential person on the Internet by Fast Company Magazine,  on the way social media is a key part of the route to success. 

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The first chapter then outlines the social media landscape, looking at a number of sites and services including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, reddit, imgur, Quora, and Instagram.

Next Stephan Spencer, and Jimmy Harding work through how to set up a basic social media strategy, including having a plan for how you're going to cope if you suddenly become more successful. The next two chapters look at marketing strategies for physical goods and for digital goods and services. The tactics include site specific tactics with advice on where to target your effort so it pays off. The next chapter is on local services and storefronts for those companies who are selling to local markets - restaurants, clubs, kiosks and storefronts.

 

There's an interesting chapter on designing and testing ads on Facebook that has useful advice on how not to waste lots of money, and a set of questions and answers for navigating your way through working with Facebook ads.

A chapter on Guerrilla marketing is next, followed by a chapter on professional presence and damage control that discusses how to handle negative online feedback.

Chapters on book promotion and event promotion look at specifics for these markets, with tips on how to reach the people who matter in terms of getting reviews.

A chapter on SEO - search engine optimization - looks at how to optimize for the different sites. The final two chapters cover how to reach influencers, and affiliate marketing.

This book is refreshingly hype free, and has a lot of down-to-earth and workable advice. If you're trying to sell something and want to use social media to help, it's well worth reading and will help you focus your efforts where they matter.

 

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HTML, CSS & JavaScript (In Easy Steps)

Author: Mike McGrath
Publisher: In Easy Steps
Date: July 2020
Pages: 480
ISBN: 978-1840788785
Print: 184078878X
Kindle: B08FBGXGF1
Audience: would-be web developers
Rating: 5
Reviewer Mike James
The three core web technologies in a single book.



Seriously Good Software

Author: Marco Faella
Publisher: Manning
Date: March 2020
Pages: 328
ISBN: 978-1617296291
Print: 1617296295
Kindle: B09782DKN8
Audience: Relatively experienced Java programmers
Rating: 4.5
Reviewer: Mike James
Don't we all want to write seriously good software?


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Last Updated ( Saturday, 19 November 2016 )