In 2021, it should ideally be redundant to have to explain the importance of a social media presence for eCommerce firms. Just about every modern-day seller sets up social media accounts for their business in the very early stages, alongside website development and creating other digital assets like logos, CTAs, blog posts, and video content. The problem is, most businesses neglect to do anything past this point. It almost seems as if they feel they have done everything necessary by creating a social media account, when in fact it is the very first step.
Ways to Boost eCommerce Performance Using Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool that can be used for several important business goals at the same time. It can be a useful part of your talent acquisition strategies by helping you reach out to a larger potential candidate pool. It can help you boost brand awareness and build a larger, more interested audience. It can even be a key driver to boost your eCommerce performance. For your social media presence to effectively contribute to the growth of your business and eCommerce sales, you need to leverage it effectively. This blog discusses the following ways you can make this happen:
Focus on User-Generated Content
User-generated content is a very important social asset. It can be the strongest form of social proof and business credibility as far as social media audiences are concerned. User-generated content is often a great way to engage with your audiences and start building a relationship based on trust. Future customers will always give weight to the opinions of customers who have already bought your product. User-generated content can often offer important information that can help future buyers get the most out of their purchases.
Choose and Use the Right Hashtags
Using hashtags is a great way to supplement your visibility and reach out to interested audiences. Modern social media users don’t just follow brands, pages, and influencers, but hashtags as well, provided they are relevant to the user’s interest. The trick is to use as many relevant hashtags as you can to reach out to social media users that fit your consumer persona. In other words, hashtags will help give your brand and products visibility to a more relevant audience that is already interested in products or services similar to yours.
Promote Flash Sales In-Between Regular Campaigns
Social media platforms tend to offer more visibility than a search engine for the simple reason that people use search engines for specific queries, as opposed to using social media for news, entertainment, socializing, and interactions. That automatically implies that people spend more time on social media than search engines, which may be a useful aspect for you to leverage. If your brand (like most brands) already runs regular campaigns throughout the year, you can supplement them with flash sales and exclusive deals promoted on your social media. The key here is to create urgency, capturing the attention of the social media user and encouraging them to click on the enticing ad. Ultimately, you can direct this traffic to your website for an influx of traffic and conversions.
Use Instagram Shopping Tags for Products
While Instagram has historically been great for brand engagement and influencer marketing, it used to have limited shopping ability. This isn’t a surprise, since the platform was originally developed as an image-sharing application. Instagram has long since overcome that hurdle and now serves as one of the major channels for brands to engage with audiences and drive sales. A significant factor in this has been the introduction of shopping tags. Posts with products can be tagged with the brands that made them, and if they are appealing enough, you can be sure people will soon start pouring in to buy them.
Run Strategic and Targeted Social Media Ads
Strategic social media ad campaigns are one of the best ways to start generating sales and leads as soon as possible. Simply building awareness and a following is not the end-goal, sales and profits are. But even with a larger following, you may not be seeing the jump in sales and conversions you want, which is where social media ads can be a huge asset. Social media ads are paid ads that you can run for targeted audiences, segmented by age, gender, interests, social connections, and much more. Provided the ads do not violate the social media platform’s rules and guidelines, a well-executed campaign can bring instant attention and a jump in eCommerce performance.
Understand How to Use Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics is exactly what makes social media marketing in particular, and digital marketing in general, so accurate and precise. Social media platforms offer detailed analytics on your page, your activity, and performance. Social media platforms usually come with a detailed analytics dashboard containing metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, ad spend, ad performance, campaign effectiveness, and much more. But you need to spend some time learning how to understand and use them to further refine your social media strategy, in line with your overall digital marketing goals.
