How can I most effectively use Twitter to increase traffic and promote sales for our fine art business?

[nomadjim]

My wife and I are struggling to promote her sales of Fine art wildlife art and nature paintings; both originals and fine art prints.We have had a website for over 10 years; with virtually no traffic, and only an occasional sale (averaging about one per year). How can we most effectively use the Twitter platform to generate leads and sales?

[-Ash-]

I agree with Joey.

In addition to looking at who your customers are.

I'd also do a little snooping to see what you're competitors are doing and see how you compare.

[gowebsol]

Hi James.

The short answer is build a following and interact with them. I have many more questions than answers for you, though, starting with why Twitter? Twitter is a thriving, brand aware community of affluent users, but it's a smaller user base (23% of adult Internet users) than say Facebook (71% of adult Internet users), and only about half of those are active. That's still a LOT of people, but is that where your customers are? If so, great! If not, you may want to re-evaluate.

I have a feeling with that number of sales you aren't doing anything else to market the website, so I feel like Twitter isn't the place to start. I would look hard at who your customers are, where they spend their time, and then figure out the best way to reach them. There are many more effective ways to do that than Twitter.

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

You could actually create one Question for Twitter and Facebook instead of creating two.

Well my advice will be simple.

Read Bufferapp Blog and Social Media Examiner.

Cool to awesome advice in there.

[EGOL]

A really well-known person with lots of twitter followers, that include a lot of people who have purchased his/her items in the past, might be able to sell a little bit of art via twitter.  If you don't have that follower base already, it will be really hard to build it.

Selling stuff on websites requires an enormous amount of work to position the website in the search engines where people who are interested in your products are going to find it.  I have a website that sells craft items and two people work on that website for a few hours each day.  That is just to hold our positions, we worked really hard for a couple of years straight to gain the positions.

The place where I would go if I had art to sell would be Etsy.  It is an art marketplace and the buyers come to you.   Still no guarantee that you are going to sell anything because making a sale depends upon many things beyond getting your items in front of visitors.

Have you tried Etsy?  I would go there first.