Is social media marketing a must-have tool for a successful e-Commerce business? Hell yes. We are living in the Digital era, so social media is gradually becoming an integral part of our everyday routine, covering every aspect of life: from purely entertaining to highly professional. 90% of consumers today look up products they need online, using their mobiles and tablets.
The customer and his expectations have changed greatly and have become deeply involved in the shopping process: doing research, comparing prices, writing and reading reviews. Digital engagement and customer experience are not just some popular expressions. The retailers do their best to persuade customers to make a purchasing decision and social media greatly contributes to it.
How Can Your Business Benefit from Social Media?
-
You don’t have to pay
Free marketing sounds tempting, doesn’t it? If you can do it all yourself, it will only cost you your time unless you decide to do promoted posts. You could handle your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Instagram accounts by yourself. There are even free tools such as MavSocial you can use to acquire free amazing images and push them to all your accounts.
If you can’t do it yourself, plan on hiring an experienced social media manager who uses a heavy social media management (SMM) tool popular among large corporations with numerous social media accounts and a substantial budget.
-
Establish a close dialogue with your customers
Communicating with your target audience directly enables you to base your campaigns and offerings on real-time feedback and reviews of your potential customers. If you are lucky to strike the right note and reach your audience with your message, you will get a real advantage over numerous competitors. Besides, you can use social networks as a playground for testing your new products and ideas carefully listening what your followers like and what they don’t.• Ever-living source of your website traffic
You can use social networks as a playground for testing your new products and ideas, carefully listening to what your followers like and what they don’t care about to fine tune your offerings.
-
Ever-living source of your website traffic
Social networks perform as a 24/7 shop for your potential customers. Sharing information about happy hours, promo activities, special offers, or new collections on your social accounts will drive traffic to your e-Commerce store. Every post you create gives your followers a direct link to your store, which results in a huge influx of visitors. The world of social media never sleeps.
-
How to make it work?
Try to start with the very basics and set real goals. Think of measurable objectives: traffic you want to achieve, the number of new followers you want to attract, visitors to conversions ratio, and of course, the ratio of audience growth to actual sales.
Ask what the customers want before posting something you think they want. Track your audience’s interactions to understand their preferences. Don’t forget about your site’s analytics, giving you all the necessary details: visitors’ behavior, content that receives the highest engagement rate, etc.
Remember that in B2C e-commerce marketing, remember that it’s a long journey with the aim of establishing trustworthy relationships with your potential customers, but not a direct selling tool. Social media is mostly for sharing, rather than selling.
While many people do start their purchasing activity on Facebook or Instagram, most of them don’t intend to shop there. They are usually looking for useful and helpful information, and your product becomes a pleasant and desirable bonus of their pre-shopping investigation.
Benefit from Social Media for eCommerce
Once you’ve dived deep inside the social media world, try these useful tactics to raise your traffic and boost your ecommerce business success:
1) Optimization
Use keywords to enhance search visibility and attract larger audiences. Conduct keyword research to understand what your customers are interested in.
2) Engaging content
Don’t post promotional materials only. Provide your followers with useful information, educational content and tips they may find reliable. Keep an 80/20 balance between interesting and promotional.
3) Let reviews work for you
Positive feedback from satisfied customers spreads your social media marketing for you. Most people say they trust online reviews more than advertising and colorful descriptions.
4) Sharing buttons
Every site and blog post should have prominent sharing butons. That includes ecommerce stores which should have “pin it” buttons on every product image so that potential buyers can save and share them on their wish lists on Pinterest.
5) A picture is worth a thousand words
Image-centered content works better than text-centered. Be creative and optimize your product descriptions, blog and social media posts with relevant visual content.
6) Talk to your followers
Join various groups, start a live chat, write a blog and don’t forget to use hashtags.
Today, social media rules the business world and the e-commerce market alike. Don’t miss your chance to increase your brand’s awareness, boost traffic and improve conversion rates. Even Magento offers Facebook and Twitter Promo extensions.
Use these tools to grow your business and build relationships that turn potential shoppers into loyal customers.
Rachel Jonat
Latest posts by Rachel Jonat (see all)
- How to Benefit from Social Media - March 19, 2016
Every website owner should read this post as its really informative and very useful who wants to get good benefited from social media.
Md.rasel would love you to read ..Clipping path and Uses
yup, this is now marketing through social media is very influential, especially in my country of marketing via instagram so extremely profitable for the seller nya.dan thanks for the tips you have given. This adds to my knowledge on social media
nayla would love you to read ..Variasi Sepatu Sport Nike Terbaru Untuk Jiwa Mudamu
social media plays important role in getting good results. Images are the best weapons to grow social meadia followers.
Thank you for the Article.
Balu would love you to read ..Sardaar Gabbar Singh (2016) Telugu Songs Lyrics | Pawan Kalyan
Hi,
The best think that you have shared and i liked the most that social media is free and we can do it with some extra efforts.
Robin Khokhar would love you to read ..11 Things That Hurt SEO And How to Avoid Those Mistakes?
Good article . i think social media is a part of business . now a day we can run our business more fast through our social media . social media keep the user contact with the business . Now a day’s we can not ignore the social media for our business .
You have share a good information to us . your way of describing the things so good . it is a good effort made by you.
Thanks for sharing a good article with us .
Facebook is the best marketing tool for many business. we use facebook to approach my customers easily. p/s: Thank you for your post.
thanks so much, i’m gonna use social network to boost my blog, anyway, can you make a list of top social network for us, plz, thanks 😀
DAVID would love you to read ..ENGAGE PLAYER REVIEW AND BONUSES
Hi David,
See How to Decide Which Social Networks are Most Important to YOU/
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..How To Blog With Conversions In Mind
Social Media can be your business’ bestfriend. It can help you promote your business and establish a strong brand on the web. But to make the most of social media sites you have to create a solid plan for your campaign.
George would love you to read ..TIME MANAGEMENT IN BPO COMPANIES
Hi Gail, the only point I disagree with on this that you don’t have to pay for it. With Facebook Pages, the algorithm makes you pay for being seen by your followers. Others only 1-2% of your followers will see your posts. At least it is not expensive to market on their network YET.
Social media is a great way to conduct customer service. Some companies like Southwest are awesome with it and a few others not so awesome. It really has changed the way people interact with companies now. It really is amazing how far it has come and interesting to see where it will go in the coming years.
Lisa Sicard would love you to read ..10 Valuable Tidbits About Twitter Celebrating It’s 10th Year
Hi Lisa,
I agree that to get much out of Facebook you really have to pay unless you can educate your followers to change their settings so they see your updates. I changed mine on all the stores but missed one – and they went out of business and I missed out on stocking up on what I have found no other source selling.
For local businesses, you can really target on Facebook and generate some sales.
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..How To Blog With Conversions In Mind
Excellent tips you have shared here, nowadays Social Media sites are one of the most important criteria to make a business popular, grow and successful.
Thank you so much for the useful tips.
Anil Saha would love you to read ..UKSSSC Recruitment For Various Posts 2016 | http://www.sssc.uk.gov.in jobs
Hello ,
I think social media is very important for promoting online business upto much extent. Thanks for sahring.
Paul would love you to read ..Download Peel Zoo App
Social media plays an important role in the improvement of a business. It helps to create fans, get more traffic, more marketing and advertisement and so on.
Mungurul Alam would love you to read ..What is AM and PM?
I think social media buttons are most power full tool for website. It is a good idea to drive big volume of traffic to your website, Rachel Jonat thank you for sharing this article.
Hi Gaurav,
Your comments are going directly into spam. Even though I deleted Akismet from my WordPress installation, WordPress insists on using their blacklist even on sites that don’t have Akismet installed. This is their way of censoring the most active commenters. You can request they remove you from the blacklist, but you’re likely to land back on it again. A better solution might be to tweet at any blogger when you comment and let them know to rescue your comment.
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..IOT: eCommerce Retail Trends Revolution
Now days people are fed with the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Instagram and other sites are using for the best possible solutions to for their business solutions benefits.
Article was great | thanks for share…
Yeah I really appreciate with your thoughts and the post is really great I have to admit this ….
Angel Kelly would love you to read ..Transitions In UX Design
Social media is the biggest platform for online promotion. you can gain visitors and turn them into customer.
Hello ,
We all know that how social media is ruling our life very well and in today’s world no one can ignore social media platforms for promoting their business online. But , one must take care of the good qualiity content and must be customer domain.
Hello ,
I find this very helpful and i think social media is a very major factor to implent for promoting online busniness.
Now-a-days social media using is increasing now day by day for different product marketing purpose. This are definitely useful & so effective for the huge amount of product definition introducing & sales.
M Fuser would love you to read ..What is Crowdfunding?
one should also post ” good tip of the day and question of the day” on social media for engagement with users.
kaju would love you to read ..Best Practices and Recommendations for Social Media Marketing