So you’ve created some good ecards and uploaded them on 123Greetings Studio. What next? How do you get people to check out your creations? You have to use ways and means to draw their attention and bring them to see what’s on offer; which means you need to market your creations. Thanks to web 2.0, things just got easier!

From various social media platforms, your own website or blog, to different artist communities or forums – you could use them all to your advantage. There’s a plethora of social media platforms just waiting to be explored. Each, however, has its own set of nuances and unique ways of working. If you’ve figured how to make the most of each of them you’ve found your way to success!

So the main question now is, how do you use social media to market your ecards? We’ll explain how you can use two biggest social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter to market your ecards, this week, and look at some others next week.

Facebook

1. Promote your Studio profile URL: 123Greetings Studio gives you a URL for your profile. Provide this URL in your “About me” section.
2. Post on your friends’ walls: Share the links to your works on your wall or share them on your friends’ walls. Encourage them to comment, like and share them. But don’t do it too often, lest you turn your friends away.
3. Send messages to your friends / groups / everyone: Send the link of your Studio profile or individual ecards to your friends with a personal message, telling them why you’re sending it to them.
4. Use notes: Write notes that relate to your works, providing links to them. Perhaps, you could put a short write-up on what inspired you to create that particular ecard or the thoughts that went into it, or anything related to the emotions expressed in it.
5. Upload images: Images of your ecards are a great way to grab the attention of people. You can create an album of the snapshots of your cards. With each snapshot, provide the link to direct them to the ecard.
6. Use hashtags: Hasthtags help you make your work easy to find or increase its searchability. Using hashtags relevant to your content is the key.
7. Tag your friends: Whatever is the type of post – status updates, wall posts, notes or photos – tagging your friends on them will help get their attention, as well as, the attention of their friends. Moderation, however, would be the keyword here because you don’t want to spam their walls!

Having more people interact with your post would help in making it viral, and thereby increase its reach. This will invite people to not just check out your ecards but also send them, thereby increasing your ecards views and sends on Studio, thereby increasing your popularity and fan-following.

Twitter

Twitter is another ideal place for promoting your work and growing your fan-base or followers. Here’s a list of things that could help your market your portfolio through Twitter.

1. Link to your Studio profile: Provide a link to your Studio portfolio on your Twitter profile page. This way, anyone who visits your profile can be directed to your work.
2. Tweet about your work: Don’t just give links to your ecards. Instead, put an interesting tweet along with the link. It would be a good idea to shorten the links (this can be done easily using free websites like bitly.com).
3. Don’t go overboard: Linking every tweet with your work would be blatant promotion and appear pushy. Not recommended as it annoys people, and may cause them to unfollow you.
4. Follow the right people: Use Twitter’s search feature to find profiles that are of interest to you and are related to your area of work, e.g. ecard developers, artists, graphic designers, photographers and the like. Follow them to keep tab on what’s happening. Use the Twitter RSS feed to get notified every time a tweet containing a certain keyword is posted.
5. Engage in conversations: Start conversations by replying to people talking about topics that are of interest to you. This helps you get connected with like-minded people.
6. Retweet often: Whenever you come across content that is of interest to you, retweet it. Chances are your followers would be interested too.
7. Ask for feedback: It is equally important to hear what people have to say. Don’t just talk about yourself and your works. Share your works with people and ask them for their feedback. Helps you get different perspectives and also get people interested in your work.
8. Use hashtags: Hasthtags help you make your work easy to find or increase its searchability. Using hashtags relevant to your content is the key.
9. Build followers: The more people come to know about you and your works, the more click-through you would get to your portfolio.
10. Thank people: Thank people for retweeting your content and, maybe, return the favor by retweeting their links or mentioning their twitter names.
11. Background: You could also have your profile background to reflect your works. That would help you brand yourself as a successful ecard designer!

Go try these helpful tricks and look out for our next blog that will talk about marketing your ecards on other popular social media websites.