Social Media: Don’t Leave Home Without It

YOU CAN’T TALK about online retail without exploring how social networks fit in. Here are a few tidbits straight from our sources from our ongoing series on e-commerce.

• “I think social media is very important. One of the services we provide to our school customers is promotional awareness materials, so we’ll create 800 x 600-pixel social media cards that they can quickly send out on Facebook.” –Chris Berger, Rokkitwear

• “It’s a source of advertising. That’s really what social media comes down to: People are being advertised [to], but they don’t want to feel like they’re being advertised to.” –Elliott Gress, The Naptown Collective

• “A lot of it is educating the world that you can customize socks, so we need to give them a lot of examples. We do that through social media by posting regularly on Instagram and showing them: ‘Here’s what you could do for a bar mitzvah.’ ‘Here’s what you could do for a sports team.’” –Hayley Mullin, Sockprints

• “I’ll always want to create that dialogue, with everything that I’m making, that it’s not just a T-shirt or it’s not just sweatpants, but this stands for a larger group of people and what those people value.” –Elliott Gress, The Naptown Collective

• “We’re on Pinterest and have had some success with that. We get a lot of wedding customers there.” –Hayley Mullin, Sockprints

• “Facebook is huge. At the end of the day, even though we’re in the school market, the purchaser is ultimately Mom and Dad. Moms are way more aligned with Facebook than anything else. When we are working with athletic directors and coaches, they’re primarily on Twitter. And Instagram, their stock’s rising in our eyes.” –Chris Berger, Rokkitwear