The NextWeb has taken a look at a newly launched tool for sharing your eBay items with your followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook.
Fflap, a UK-based company, is a “social selling tool” for eBay and claims that it will help you reach a bigger audience and sell your items faster:
The basic tools provided enable a user to search for listings, select the relevant items to tell their social networks about, add a personalised message, schedule when to inform social networks then track and graphically report the success of the fflapped message through bidding to sale. This last bit is very important as, based on the reports, you can adjust your fflap strategy to maximise the fflap platform’s results for your trading style.
It allows you to schedule Tweets and status updates throughout the day (and to regulate them so that you aren’t completely spamming your friends and followers), and it also gives each item its own page, rather than the normal eBay listing page, on which you can add an audio excerpt about the product (pretty useless in my opinion), with a more useful video option coming in the future.
These Fflap-hosted pages also give greater stats on views and clicks than you normally get on eBay itself.
Whilst there is a free plan which gives you 5 “Daily Fflaps”, to use the schedule you have to upgrade to a paid account, of which there are 2 levels. At $3.50 / $5.00 per month, they’re not extortionate, but you’ll still need to factor it in to your eBay selling to see if it’s worthwhile. Really casual eBayers will probably not bother using a service like this, but it’s a small price to pay if you’re regularly selling on there.
Another factor in Fflap’s effectiveness will be your social media profile – naturally, it will help if you have a large number of friends or followers who will see your listings, although some of Fflap’s features, such as search engine friendly listing pages, will help your items reach a wider audience.