Social Media Marketing for Ecommerce – The Ultimate Guide

by alex| in Web to Print on August 23, 2019 9:49 am 2932 /

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Even with the massive popularity of social media channels, many businesses, especially eCommerce stores, are yet to tap the power of social media. Joining any social media channel will immediately expose you to millions of users at hand. Many have tried with unsure attempts but failed.

Like any other technology, social media is also continuously evolving, which is why strategies of yesterday may not work today. With an attempt to give their users relevant content, the social media channels are also updating their features and have also given selling power to brands. 

If you haven’t yet made your mark on the social media or just want to improve on your game, this blog post will be the guiding light for your social media marketing venture. I will help you get more brand awareness, drive more traffic and eventually make more sales.

Here we will discuss proven strategies that have worked for thousands of brand and will also work for you. This post is all about empowering your eCommerce store to engage and work alongside your social media channels. 

What Makes Social Media Important for Ecommerce?

Although Google search is the major factor of traffic to e-commerce websites, social media also holds a pretty big share into driving traffic to web stores. 

The trend has been gradually moving from reading status updates to watching videos and live stream contents. Video posts are one of the reasons why social media channels such as Facebook is continuously growing every year.

Although these videos don’t necessarily link out to other websites, it does help you to build your brand. It has also become a major source of customer service for most companies as they get to interact with their customers directly. 

It is expected that nearly 90% of the brands will use social media for customer service and customer support in the next two years. 

There is a good reason why this works! Today most customers spend nearly 40% more for the brand they have interacted on social media. You can guess the amount of opportunity a business gets from the fact that there are nearly 3 billion users active on social media right now. The market is huge and you just can’t ignore it. 

Although it gets its fair share of usage from users of all ages, it is still dominated by the younger generation. Right now, ignoring social media is just like letting your competitors win while you are figuring out what went wrong. Even if you are the conventional type, you can’t let go of the power of social media. 

Not just your customers have an account, but they use it too, actively, on a daily basis. It is estimated that an individual on an average spends nearly 2 hours on social media per day. That’s a lot of time for a brand to make an impact. It also suggests that your customers are probably spending more time on social media than checking out your eCommerce store or any other websites for that matter. 

Driving Traffic from Social Media?

You can use social media to drive traffic to your eCommerce store or you can also use to make sales. What you are looking for making connections, building relationships and getting more engagement from your target users. This is how you get more traffic to your website, simply by making connections. Survey shows that users who experience positive engagement with a brand, they are more likely to recommend that brand to others. 

When someone recommends your brand on social media or share your content it has a much greater impact than they share with some of their co-workers. In order to create positive interactions and impact on your target users, you have to make sure that you are posting content that best resonates with them. 

Like I said before because of the human interaction in social media, today nearly 80% of customers think that social media is the future of customer service. The survey suggests that nearly 90% of customers will not purchase a product from a brand if the brand leaves their queries unanswered on social media. Nearly 80% of customers have improved their perceptions of a brand after chatting with them online. 

In order to increase traffic to your site, you have to make sure that your social media contents are relevant, engaging and timely. Like I said before, video content today works the best, however, you can post images, content, and links to your website. 

Although organic content is what you would expect at first, it does take some time and effort. That’s why nearly 90% of brands are using social media to share and update paid ads and sponsored posts on Facebook, Instagram, etc. 

Because businesses are willing to increase their budget for Facebook and Instagram paid ads, it can be said that the paid ads works and you too should consider investing or be left behind. 

Brands who have invested in paid ads on social media are twice as likely to report that social media marketing is more effective than other marketing campaigns.

Using Facebook Content

The survey suggests that articles that are between 2000 and 2500 words are more likely to get shares on Facebook that other shorter articles. 

Also in case of videos, those that are between 4 minutes and 4 minutes, 30 seconds are more likely to get shares than other videos. 

However, you have to consider the fact that it’s not the length of the content but the relevancy and uniqueness of the content. 

Live-stream Videos

Live streaming videos is a huge deal nowadays and is probably the most popular way to engage on Facebook. According to estimates, nearly 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. 

YouTube users engage a total of 1 billion hours of video content every day. You would be amazed to know that people from all age groups from teenagers to 55 years older create and watch the live video every day. 

Instant messaging

Instant Messaging (IM) is an online communication method that is fairly recent. IM utilizes almost synchronous chats of SMS that enable two people to interact in real-time.

The main difference between older communication programs and IM is that while these older programs allow strangers to meet other people they don’t know in a virtual community, however, instant messaging is meant to enable people to interact through the internet with each other they already know in real lives.

Four main companies that dominate in the field of instant messaging are  MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ. The larger member of IM users is from colleges. As per a recent survey, it has been found that 29% of these college students tend to use IM as a form of communication at least once a day compared to 12% of the general population of Instant Messaging users

Instagram Stories

Instagram stories were launched in August 2016. It allows people to post photos and video content with the customization feature. However, these posts are temporary in nature, hence disappears after 24 hours.

Instagram stories are viewed in a slide show format, therefore you can create a storyboard or make a collage of individual posts within your stories.  

Keep viewers engaged by posting a variety of photos and content using texts and stickers.

How do you sell via social media?

• Social media is a platorm to advertise and promote sales. 
• Firstly, publish the product, images, description, website line on a social media platform especially, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
• To reach a larger public, you need to be an active promoter of products. In simple terms, you must advertise regularly to be recognized by the public.
• Participate in public discussion related to your domain, solve people queries regarding the product, as a result, it creates reliability and trust among people to purchase from your eCommerce store.

Paid advertising 

Paid advertising allows you to pay a fee, to have your website displayed on the Search Engine Results Page(SERP) when someone types in a specific keyword or key phrase to the search engine. This feature will display ads that you create to direct viewers to your site. Normally, the fee you are charged is based upon either the clicks or views of these ads.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a way to connect with visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or inquiry. It allows you to position targeted apps in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website as they browse elsewhere around the internet.

A lot of people find remarketing to be a very cost-effective method of advertising for reminding visitors to purchase your products and increase brand awareness.

In-app purchases

Many developers generate revenue by launching free-to-play games or any app that comes with a special feature or advantage if anyone makes a purchase of it. For instance, you may be asked to pay a sum to get rid of advertisements in the app or earn huge coins in a game by paying a certain amount. This especially works in video games to a particular group of people.

In a study, it was found that impatient people, especially the younger ones, tend to prefer in-app purchases compared to the patient ones, i.e. grown-up ones.

Conclusion:

There are billions of people on social media today, and even increasing. It is the best platform to promote your business, products and engage with customers.

So, start your online business using social media marketing as a key strategy to increase the number of followers, internet traffic and finally boost sales.