Hi, everybody. Ryan (Lesley's husband) here. I'm a computer systems integrator in "real life". As we started to build up Whimsy Bag's web presence, it occurred to us we needed to build an automated system to avoid creating a proverbial "monster", admin-wise. When you look at getting all your social media to sync up and carry a similar message, it can appear really daunting, maybe even impossible.
I'm writing to detail how we're set up behind the scenes, to explain how we get our message across to so many social media outlets. Whimsy Bags on Esty (http://www.etsy.com/shop/whimsybags) is only 3 months old, but we're sporting 45,000 page views so far, so I think we're doing alright.
In order to execute SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it's a known fact that your "footprint" determines how many links back to your site you create. Driving users to where you make sales requires performing well on search engine indexes. While there are many ways to game the system (SENuke, I'm looking at you), what we wanted to do was more organic in nature. We needed to build a credible, solid set of links reaching back to our sales page on Etsy. What we ended up with was a string of websites using automation, cronjobs and CMS extensions, all connected and communicating. Each new posting on Etsy resulted in a Tweet, a Facebook post and a new article identical to the Etsy posting on our CMS.
Let's begin with the chain of sites we run, and how the data travels:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/whimsybags feeds...
http://www.whimsybags.com feeds...
http://twitter.com/#!/WhimsyBags feeds...
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Whimsy-Bags/254794347874520
Four different websites, based on four different architectures. Let's talk about each.
Etsy (http://www.etsy.com)...
We needed to get our products out of Etsy's website. Having our content only reside there was not an option. A million registered users sounds like a lot, but compared to Amazon's 650 million users, it's not that impressive. So, what's the answer?
Simple: RSS.
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rss)
RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works, such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.
Unfortunately, Etsy has very limited RSS capabilities, in the sense that they don't advertise how to pull individual RSS/XML feeds with any sort of granularity.
Dreading the duplication effort required to run four sites, I started investigating how Etsy's RSS responded to queries. I couldn't find anything that described how to query Etsy and obtain RSS responses by section, which resulted in many hours of frustration.
After more than a few attempts, I found that you could call for an RSS by section like this:
www.etsy.com/shop/sitename/rss?section_id=number_of_your_section
Select one of your sections from your shop (and this is a random example):
www.etsy.com/shop/SewnNatural?section_id=5786794
...and edit the following query, looking something like this...
www.etsy.com/shop/SewnNatural/rss?section_id=5786794
Depending on your browser, you'll need to open a blank tab to view the XML. Otherwise (in some instances) you'll just be redirected to the section you're requesting an RSS feed of.
Once you have your RSS feeds for your shop sections, you can import your items as articles into a Content Management System. I prefer Joomla, but all of them import RSS in one way or another.
Which brings us to Whimsy Bags (http://www.WhimsyBags.com)...
I used FeedGator (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/news-production/automatic-articles/13573) to import Etsy items to my site. I also redirect all articles to the original Etsy page automatically. This way I use Etsy to do all sales.
Finally, I set up a cronjob to make sure the RSS feeds were pulled into our Joomla site on a regular basis.
FeedGator now publishes each new item from Etsy as a new article on WhimsyBags.com.
On to Twitter (http://www.twitter.com)...
In order to get our articles from Joomla to Twitter, we had to figure out which Joomla Extension worked best. There are literally thousands of extensions to download, but a more than a few of them are "commercial", meaning you need to pay for them.
I played around with quite a few of the "non-commercial" (see: free) ones. I settled on
the "Sharable Plugin" (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/social-web/republish/17477), configured it for our Twitter handle (@whimsybags), and saw each article send off a tweet.
Note: Sharable Plugin for Joomla only allows tweeting of new articles. If you have a lot of content in your site prior to deploying this plugin, simply unpublish and republish all your articles. You will see all of your articles queued up within the Sharable Job Control Panel.
Finally, we arrive at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Whimsy-Bags/254794347874520, the Whimsy Bags company Facebook page...
When you create your new FB company page, you have the option to connect Twitter to Facebook. Select "Edit Page" from your company home page, and select the Twitter application. Follow the instructions, and you will soon be receiving the tweets from Twitter.
I think we'll have to blog, tweet and FB post every so often, if for no other reason than to make it appear we aren't as automated as we are. Still, it's nice to know that we don't have to manually update four different sites.
Contact us if you have any questions about the process. We're eager to hear feedback about any of our sites!
Cheers,
Ryan
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