by
Robert Janis
If you are an ecommerce retailer, then there is a good chance that your customers or potential customers belong to one or more social networks. The manifestation of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Foursquare, and more have given a platform for the world’s inhabitants to share all sorts of information about themselves from what they eat to where they shop and what they buy.
Howmanyarethere.net reports that there are more than 200 “well known” social networking sites on the Internet. Ebizmba.com notes that the top 15 “most popular” social networking sites with the estimated number of monthly visits to those sites are:
- Facebook 750,000,000
- Twitter 250,000,000
- Linkedin 110,000,000
- Pinterest 85,500,000
- Myspace 70,500,000
- Google+ 65,000,000
- DevantArt 25,500,000
- LiveJournal 20,500,000
- Tagged 19,500,000
- Orkut 17,500,000
- CareMom 12,500,000
- Ning 12,000,000
- Meetup 7,500,000
- MyLife 5,000,000
- Multiply 4,000,000
What if ecommerce retailers could easily connect to the people who use these sites? Well, they can. OneAll, a software company based in Luxembourg, has created a simple plug-in that ties an ecommerce retailer who uses it to more than 20 social network sites. Moreover, the ecommerce site owner or webmaster does not have to do anything. It makes the connections automatically.
First, the plug-in makes it easy for new visitors to your site to register. All they have to do is to provide the name of a social network of which they are a member and then click once. Automatically your database has information on that visitor which appears on his or her social network site profile. Once the connection has been made, the visitor can share information to their social network from your site. For example, they can share with their friends that they are shopping at your site and describe what they are buying. Moreover, you are supplied with the person’s email address and you get demographic information about the person. The customer does not have to fill in any forms. The OneAll plug-in captures the information automatically from the social networking site and sends it to your database.
In addition, the plug-in tracks the activity of your customers so you can see how many times they have logged into your site. You can track new customers, ascertain how many times they have visited your site, and, as mentioned, the customer can share with their friends from your site and you can track the referral traffic that results. The data the OneAll plug-in provides you can then be used to determine what social network your customers prefer so you can focus your marketing to those specific sites.
If you attempted or hired an Internet expert to do this, you would have to figure out a way to connect with the API and protocol of all the different networks independently. However, the OneAll plug-in uses Social REST API, which allows it to connect with more than 20 social network sites automatically and seamlessly.
Claude Schlesser is the CEO of OneAll and is the creator of the plug-in. He is a Partner Account Manager for Oracle in Belgium and has more than 20 years of sales experience with IT hardware and software companies as well as six years of engineering experience. He has sold Oracle technology and application products to companies in the telecom and financial services industries. Before joining Oracle, he served as a regional sales manager for Bell Systems/Digiquant and LHS and was a business manager in customer care and billing for IBM.
The company claims that more than 100,000 websites worldwide are already using the plug-in.
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