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Online merchants know it’s important to interact with consumers and expand website traffic to increase sales. Online sellers use may Internet marketing tactics to this end. An excellent tactic for building traffic and interest in your products is to post and network on social media sites, which can result in many interesting conversations and more qualified traffic to your site. Below is TopTenWholesale’s list of social media sites for building traffic.

Our article about Mobile Marketing got a lot of interest from wholesalers and general merchandise vendors last month. While integrating social, mobile and email campaigns can yield great results, we know many merchants are not yet using integrated online marketing campaigns. Therefore, we’d like to provide information about social, mobile email integrated campaigns for your online marketing strategy as these media are used daily by consumers and marketers alike.

Since the advent of social media, wholesalers and general merchandise vendors have seen a significant change in B2B buying behavior, especially over the past few years. People are using social networks to access and share many different kinds of information about companies, brands and products. As a result, wholesalers are using social media marketing tactics more and more on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Wholesalers and general merchandise vendors looking to improve customer service might want to consider the benefits social networking communities can have on their business. Social media communities are full of like-minded people who want to share, discuss, and learn more about industry issues. There can be common interests in the goods and services sold online, as well as many other topics such as returned goods, online fraud and promotions that work. Given the opportunity, wholesalers can capitalize on the ability to communicate with their current and prospective customers.

According to the latest Pew Research Center Report on Social Networking, 13 percent of online adults use Twitter, representing a significant increase from the 8 percent of adult Twitter users in November 2010. The number of people using Twitter in the 25-34 and 55-64 age groups more than doubled since then. Many wholesalers and general merchandise vendors are using Twitter for marketing and branding as shown in the Tweet below by USA Wholesalers.

A recently published Government-sponsored report in Australia revealed that, in the view of the author, small retail businesses would not exist in five years. No more independent bookshops, news agents, garden centres or travel agents. I can accept that we are seeing dramatic changes, but the disappearance of these sectors in retailing takes some digesting.

Wholesale businesses and small businesses with limited resources in time and money are beginning to use low-cost marketing tactics on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to increase sales. A survey by MerchantCircle’s quarterly Merchant Confidence Index recently reported social media marketing has increased by 40 percent over the past 12 months. Some of the key conclusions of the survey are outlined below, as well as a list of social media marketing tips.

The way we search on the web is changing as new search engines make social networking a part of the search experience. New search engine Blekko allows searchers to use their Facebook friends to filter web queries. Montage from Microsoft’s Future Social Experience Labs (FUSE) allows users to gather recent web content on a specific topic, making a digital album of their links for sharing on Twitter or Facebook.

2010 came to a close with a bang, and 2011 promises to be even better. It’s time for wholesalers, manufacturers and retailers to learn from the digital trends of last year for use in increasing sales and profits this year. 2010 was the year of social media with Google playing catch-up. We also saw the rise of Facebook, the ubiquity of Twitter, the propagation of mobile marketing and the promise of video advertising.

Tweeting. Ah, the complexity of how to do it. What do you tweet about? When do you tweet? For that matter, why do you tweet at all? For retailers, manufacturers, vendors, wholesalers and manufacturer representatives, Twitter provides an outlet for communication and marketing – two things you can’t live (or at least successfully live) without in the business of retail & manufacturing. When using Twitter, there are certain “do’s” and …

Technology has played an undeniable role in the lives of everyone, and for Internet marketing it’s been a real era of discovery these past ten years. As bigger corporations and bodies are making the switch from experimentation to integration, owing to their relatively large marketing budgets and resources, smaller companies and independent players can benefit from learning their methods. It also pays to know what insiders have been learning as they contributed to the pool of knowledge, too. One of the key areas of development is in budgeting for social media marketing, especially during a time when every dollar counts.

Do you tweet? Hope so. In this crazy world of technology driven consumers and social media, Twitter has leveraged itself to be a key component in the retail marketing mix. If you haven’t already dove into the world of tweeting, it’s time to start. Here’s why. Support Your Current Customers Customer service takes on a whole new meaning with Twitter involved. In an instant you can respond to a question …

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock in the middle of a remote desert for the last few years, you are probably noticing some huge, eye-catching, and powerful changes to the Internet as we know it. We’ve seen things like the deployment of sophisticated VPNs and proxies to help honest businesspeople thwart countless awkward attempts to hamper communications in Internet-restrictive countries like China, and all of us have marveled at the array of new technology like simple-looking but completely Earth-shattering tag clouds, cutting-edge SEO devices, and interoperability features of Web 2.0 environments as they come to the surface. It’s looking like the floodgates are not only opening up… they’re virtually blasting apart, and the Internet community is ready to rise to the challenge, as the torrents of fast-flowing waters of technology surround us. In this kind of situation, there are only two kinds of Internet-based businesses: those who will sink, and those who will continue to swim as they find themselves surrounded by countless new opportunities!

It’s been a rough ride, in an online climate that has seen a dizzying number of historic events in the last few years. There have been political coups allegedly spurred on by twittering and tweeting revolutionaries; the Beijing Olympics, and the uproar caused by promises broken to bring more “openness” to Internet coverage of the Games, and subsequent media interaction; video has exploded onto the mainstream media outlets; newspapers and traditional journalism have apparently finally accepted the fact that online content is nudging them out of the race; and for expats and a growing number of citizens in China, there is still no legal access to sites like facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, to name only three. What’s the good news?

Is it the mother of all trade shows for 2010, or will it be a collision of cultures, as thousands of professionals in a wide variety of industries get together for this monster of an event? Here’s a quick preview of what’s to come in the upcoming Shanghai Expo, and perhaps a few questions and answers that may help to narrow your own search for the right information as you consider the possibilities – and realities – of making a trip out to this historic event for yourself.