So I received a comment on my post about using Twitter to market my eBay listings asking how to set up what I was talking about. I am nothing if not willing to help so I offered to write up a quick How-To. If you are finding yourself on this page first, you may want to quickly read the original post before you set this up so that you know what is going on.

Firstly, if you are already a Twitter user, you are going to want to set up a new account, one that will only be a promotion tool for your eBay listings and possibly blog (if you wish). If you are selling more than 5 items a week, importing your eBay listings into your normal “chatting” Twitter feed will just annoy your followers.

If you have never used Twitter before, no problem! Just go to the Twitter homepage and create an account. I would recommend using your business or eBay user ID as your Twitter name for consistency. Once you have created a profile and uploaded an avatar, you are ready to begin.

There are two ways to do this, one very easy, one a little harder. It’s up to you which one works best for your needs.

The Super Easy Method

  1. Go to Twibler.com and create an account.
  2. Set-up Twibler to automatically import your eBay listings to Twitter.

That’s it! Pretty easy, huh?

The Harder But More Customizable Method

This method has a few more steps but has the advantage that you can customize it in several ways, track clicks from your Twitter feed to your listings and tracking conversions if you wish. It also allows you to decide how you want your listings to import (ending soonest, just listed, etc). Please also note that the method below can be used to import listings from any other sales platform that offers your listings as RSS or from your blog.

  1. Create an account on Twitterfeed.com. (This site uses OpenID so you may need to create an OpenID if you don’t already have one.)
  2. Input the RSS feed of your eBay listings. If you have a store, you can easily grab this link from the bottom of your store homepage. If you do not have a store, you can create this through Advanced search. (Example: I set up an Advanced Search for only listings newly listed from pricednostalgia here. Scroll to the bottom to see the RSS button and pull the RSS link.) If you are really lazy, you can just edit out pricednostalgia from that link I set up with your own username or you can set your own parameters in Advanced Search and then pull your RSS feed. You can use the many selections that eBay offers to decide if you only want to market certain listings on your Twitter feed or everything and what order you want them to post in. 
  3. Optional: If you are a member of the eBay Partner Network (the eBat affiliate program) you can also embed your affliate link into the feed you import. This not only earns you a credit for every item you refer but also lets you track buyer behavior and clicks. This can be done one of two ways. Either copy and paste the RSS link you got above into the Link Generator on the Partner site or use the affiliate options on the Advanced Search page to embedd your affiliate code. 

You can also use Twitterfeed to import any RSS source so non-eBay sellers can use that tool to promote their listings from elsewhere on Twitter as well.

Hope that cleared things up for those of you that needed a more step-by-step process outlined for you!