Etsy Inc. is getting social to help its sellers sell more.

The online marketplace for handcrafted goods is embracing social media marketing with its launch of Shop Updates, a tool that aims to help sellers create and share promotional content on social media.

The tool enables a seller using the Sell on Etsy app to snap a photo, tag a listing that’s for sale in her shop and share it with their followers on Etsy, as well as on social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Tumblr. Etsy is No. 24 in the 2015 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

Depending on the platform, it takes sellers around 10 taps to create content, tag it with a listing for sale and share it on social media, says Nickey Skarstad, a group product manager on Etsy’s seller experience team. That’s far more efficient than copying and pasting information and links, as sellers previously had to do, she adds. 

“We built Shop Updates because we saw sellers using some inefficient workarounds where they create different pieces of content on different social sites,” Skarstad says. “Shop Updates is the first step toward making it easy to share one piece of optimized shopping content across many sites at one time.” 

Shop Updates posted to social networks are linked back to a landing page on Etsy that displays the photo that appeared on the social network, along with an orange Etsy “E” shopping tag that, when clicked or tapped, takes the shopper to the corresponding Etsy listing. 

More than 2,500 sellers have been testing Shop Updates since July, posting 10,000 times to social networks. Skarstad says the early results have been excellent as the social media shares are driving “promising amounts” of traffic to seller’s shops, while also boosting the number of consumers interacting with sellers on the social networks. While there have been some sales, she declined to share specific details.

The feature will be available to sellers in the next few days and is one of a series of recent moves taken by the online marketplace as it seeks to combat Amazon.com Inc., which launched Handmade at Amazon last week. For example, earlier this week Etsy rolled out Shop Settings within the Sell on Etsy app to streamline the process on a smartphone of editing listing information and adding personality to sellers’ shops. With the Shop Setting area of the app, a seller can edit or add information such as the shop’s policies, craft announcements or messages to buyers, as well as its “about” section. 

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