Posted by No matter what you’re selling, using social media for eCommerce is essential. You might have an amazing product and a fantastic website, but if you’re not marketing your online store properly, then you’re not going to get the sales you need.
People spend around 2.5 hours a day on social media. This gives your eCommerce store loads of opportunities to reach a bigger audience. You just need to know how to target these people if you want to increase sales.
Follow our guide to help you use social media for effective eCommerce marketing.
Using Social Media for eCommerce
Any eCommerce business should be using social media to boost its sales. Your business is online, your customers are online, and social media is what will bring the two together.
Social media for eCommerce covers a wide range of channels and strategies to promote your brand and your products. Social media is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage with a larger audience, and eCommerce businesses have loads of opportunities when it comes to utilizing social media.
The main functions of using social media for eCommerce include:
- Increasing brand awareness and reaching new customers
- Advertising specific products
- Driving traffic to your website
- Engaging with customers
- Selling products directly from social media
- Gathering insights around your industry
The social media channels and strategies that you choose to focus on should depend on your target audience and their online activity. When getting started with using social media for eCommerce, it’s best to start small, focused on one or two channels, and gradually expand this as your social media presence grows.
How to Use Social Media for eCommerce
Social media covers a massive space online, so there are loads of different options that you have for eCommerce social media marketing. Here are the main ways that you can use social media platforms to grow your online store.
Advertising
Paid advertising on social media is one of the best ways for your business to reach a huge audience. Different social media platforms have different advertising options, but they all achieve the same goal of getting your brand seen by a much larger audience. Gaining organic traffic alone on social media can be tricky, which is why eCommerce businesses should be using paid advertising.
Social media ads offer some of the best personalization available. This is because social media sites are able to capture loads of useful data on their users, which can help marketers to target very specific audiences.
When you set up social media advertising for your eCommerce store, your ads need to have clear objectives. This can include things like promoting a specific collection, generating buzz around a new product launch, or increasing traffic to your online store.
On Facebook and Instagram, you can run ads with Catalog Sales objectives, aimed at selling specific products. This allows you to take products from your catalog and place them in your ads. This can be incredibly useful for eCommerce store owners. You could also run ads with conversion objectives, aimed at getting users to take certain actions. Ecommerce stores that only serve a certain area can target their ads to specific areas and zip codes with hyperlocal advertising.
Social media advertising can be done across loads of platforms, but the most popular options for eCommerce would be Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more recently TikTok. Trying out different ad formats, such as videos, image ads, and collection ads can help you discover what works best for your business.
Selling Products Directly on Social Media
One of the more exciting social media strategies for eCommerce is selling products directly through social media. Native shopping solutions are popular on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, where businesses can create shoppable posts. This allows you to take your eCommerce store to social media and sell directly to social media users.
This can improve eCommerce social media marketing by allowing customers to access the product directly, instead of having to click through a long journey to get to the product. This process is known as social commerce, and it can help businesses to attract far more keen buyers. Adding product tags to posts can be a powerful tactic on visual platforms, like Pinterest and Instagram.
Social Proof and Engagement
A great way that brands can use social media is to get users to mention and post about their products. Beyond just advertising your products yourself, you should also be getting your audience to generate content for you.
Social listening is when brands mention your brand online, and it’s a tactic that eCommerce businesses should be using. This is helpful for boosting your online presence, and understanding what your audience has to say about your products.
In marketing, social proof is when people want to copy what other people are doing. Getting social media users to post about using your products is an excellent way to encourage other users to do the same, resulting in boosted sales.
Staying on top of engagement, listening to what online users are saying about your brand, and sharing their social proof is an important part of using social media for eCommerce.
Customer Service
Social media should never be underestimated as a customer service tool. Ecommerce brands can use social media to engage with their customers, answer questions, and gather feedback. Brands can ask questions and show their customers that they’re being listened to.
Doing this can help to relieve the customer service pressure that some eCommerce businesses may face. It can also help to strengthen relationships with customers and create a more positive image for brands online.
6 Social Media Strategies and Tips for eCommerce
Now that you know the main ways to use social media for eCommerce, it’s time to learn the best methods to achieve this. Here are some of the most effective strategies and tips for using social media for eCommerce.
Run a Giveaway
Running a social media contest or giveaway is one of the best ways to promote your eCommerce store. When done right, giveaways can help you to attract a much bigger audience, increase brand awareness, promote a specific product, and generate a bigger email marketing list.
All you need to do is choose your type of contest, set the rules, and pick a prize. When you use the right social promotions tool to promote your giveaway, you can gather the email addresses of every entrant. This can be used for further marketing campaigns.
Share User-Generated Content
When social media users post about your product or brand in a positive light, share that content to your stories or feed. This is a great way to show your followers how other people are using your products. Doing this helps to build trust. People online will more likely trust other social media users before brands. Building trust will help you increase sales.
Use Video Content
Video is one of the best ways to really engage with your audience and attract attention to your social media page. Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok give eCommerce businesses a great platform to share short, engaging video clips. Ecommerce brands can use things like Instagram reels as an effective way to highlight their products in action, offer helpful tips, or just engage their followers with entertaining content.
Collaborate With Influencers
Influencer marketing is huge, and eCommerce owners can benefit from it in a big way. If you want to reach a bigger audience, then partnering up with the right influencer can be a great idea.
Make sure that you choose to work with an influencer that has a following who would be interested in your products. The influencer needs to post about the kind of things that appeal to your niche and target customers. Their followers should be based in the same locations that you are able to fulfill. There’s no use reaching a massive new audience if they’re not at all interested in what you’re selling.
Make Use of All Your Social Media Real Estate
If you want to get as much traffic to your eCommerce store as you can, then you’re going to need to make every space of your social media profiles work for you. In many cases, your social media space is limited. This includes things like word counts in your bio. So make sure that you use every opportunity to highlight your eCommerce store.
Include links in your bios, add links to your stories, encourage hashtags, and make use of as many different features that each platform offers.
Your social media accounts also need to be clearly branded. All of your profile pictures and cover photos should be used to show off your online store identity. Always include links to your store wherever you can to boost your traffic and sales.
Post the Type of Content That People Want to See
Social media marketing may be about promoting your eCommerce store, but this needs to be done in a way that your followers enjoy. Don’t just focus on promotions, use your social media accounts to share interesting, helpful, and entertaining content that your followers want to find. Posting quality content is the only way to build up an organic, engaged following on social media.
Ecommerce businesses can post product images and videos, promotions and discounts, behind-the-scenes videos, how-to’s, guides on their products, and user-generated content. Posting interesting content, and posting it consistently, is essential for social media success.
Conclusion
If you want to increase your website traffic, create a more popular brand, and boost your sales, then you need to be using social media properly. Social media and eCommerce go together hand in hand.
Follow the strategies above, and you will be able to develop a complete social media strategy to boost your eCommerce sales. Of course, make sure that you use the right social media management platform to schedule your content and manage all of your social accounts from one place. This will help you to create a more powerful social media strategy without the effort.
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Now introducing Social listening. Try it for free.