If you have an ecommerce site, you want to find as many ways as possible to promote it. If you’re on Amazon, you’ll get a certain amount of traffic from Amazon itself. The same is true for other platforms such as eBay and Etsy. At the same time, you’re competing with thousands of other sellers. Whether you run your own independent site or have a store on Amazon, Etsy, eBay or elsewhere, it’s essential to do as much as you can to drive targeted traffic to your product pages. Social media provides some of the best opportunities to promote your products without spending too much. Many tactics are, in fact, free. Others, such as Facebook, Tik Tok and other social media ads, let you get a good ROI by placing highly targeted ads. Let’s look at some of the best social media strategies for ecommerce.
Decide Where to Focus Your Efforts
With so many social media sites, you can’t realistically expect to establish a strong presence on all of them. Your time and budget are limited so you have to make some decisions about where to allocate your resources. You don’t want to do this randomly, but based on analytics. Where is your audience most likely to spend time? You can make an educated guess based on the demographics of your customers. Facebook, the largest social media platform, really covers all demographics. Twitter is a close second. Others, however, are more specialized. Snapchat and Tik Tok are growing fast among younger users. Pinterest is especially popular with women.
It’s important to test your results and use real data to determine your future actions. Test campaigns on different social media sites and gauge the results. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to find out where your traffic is coming from. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms also have their own analytics tools to help you measure engagement and conversions. Remember that your social media strategy should always be evolving based on the latest data.
Engage Customers With Video
Video is one of the most powerful ways to reach ecommerce customers. You can demonstrate and explain products in a way you can’t do with text or static images. There are many ways to make and promote videos (Matrix Ecom can also help there ;)). If you’re comfortable appearing in videos yourself, you can make simple webcam videos demonstrating products. You can also make slideshow or whiteboard videos that feature products.
Live stream video is another trend that’s growing fast on social media and Amazon has also recently introduced this aspect for brand store owners. You might go live on Facebook or YouTube to introduce your latest product. With live stream videos, you could even create a regular broadcast like your own TV show. The advantage of this type of broadcast is that you can engage directly with customers, answering their questions and comments.
Educate and Entertain: Don’t Just Sell
Remember that people primarily visit social media sites to socialize and be entertained. Sometimes they want to learn something as well. Constant sales pitches, however, are a turnoff. Naturally, you want to drive traffic to your sales pages. You can still do this. Just remember to provide your followers with some engaging content as well. There are a number of ways to do this.
The previous tip was about videos. In addition to featuring product videos, you can also make some that are more social and fun, such as an informal tour of your business or city. Posts, images, and videos can combine promotion with entertainment as well. Aside from featuring your products directly, you can also share interesting videos and other content that is related to your niche. In addition to promoting products, share content that educates your audience. For example, if you sell sporting goods, share articles, videos, and infographics about the latest fitness trends. You can link to authority sites as well as publishing your own content though you don’t want to link to competitors.
Monitor and Engage
It’s important to remember that social media is about interaction. If you want people to read your content and share it, you have to monitor your pages and stay engaged. Always answer questions and reply to comments. If someone says something positive, always reply with a “thank you.” Respond to criticism and complaints as well. The only exception is outright spam or trolling comments, which you should promptly delete (another good reason to closely monitor your pages).
In addition to monitoring your own pages, you should also engage in wider social media monitoring or listening. You can do this by setting up Google Alerts for your brand or by using other social media listening tools. Take this a step further and monitor your closest competition and the latest news and trends in your industry. This gives you the ability to engage with potential customers and your competitors’ customers. By monitoring keywords related to your products, you might find comments on various social media sites, forums or question & answer sites such as Quora. When it’s appropriate, reply to these comments and questions.
Use Social Media for Customer Service
More companies now use social media as part of their customer support. Millennials are particularly fond of customer support via social media You could do this informally by answering questions your followers post on Twitter, Facebook, or other sites. You could also invite people to ask questions on your social media sites. One benefit of this is that sometimes other customers or interested followers will answer questions on your behalf. This isn’t, of course, a replacement for traditional customer support by phone or email but it can be a nice addition.
Combine Organic and Paid Promotions
If it’s in your budget, paid advertising on social media can help boost your ecommerce sales. You can send traffic directly to your product pages. This works especially well if you have a Facebook store and use Facebook ads. However, you can also send traffic to your own website, Shopify, Amazon, eBay, or other ecommerce sites. Ads are also useful for promoting organic content, such as by sending traffic to your Facebook page, blog, or opt-in page. With advertising, you have to be careful with your bidding and closely monitor your results to make sure you’re getting a solid ROI.
These are some ways that social media can help you promote your ecommerce site. There are many other actions you can take as well. Developing a social media strategy takes time. By publishing compelling content with your followers, you can grow your audience and increase engagement.
Matrix Ecom offers a wide variety of services to help ecommerce brands grow and scale. Get in touch today to see how we can help.