Use Social Media for Your Online Store Promotion Efficiently
Social media networks are playing a huge role in helping shoppers make the right buying decisions. For example, you can boost your social media platform with several services like Jarvee. However, it is not recommended to use Jarvee at all. Therefore owners of eCommerce stores should smartly embrace different social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to:
- gain the attention of the ever-growing social media audience;
- maximize brand awareness;
- improve sales and enhance eCommerce store.
Let’s take a look at some ways to use social media for eCommerce businesses.
1. Offering Social Sign-In
One of the biggest turnoffs in checkout processes is being forced to register on the website in order to complete the purchase. Most of the online customers dislike being presented with a registration form during the checkout process, and 92% of shoppers abandon a website rather than go through the process of recovering account information if they’ve forgotten their password. Online Stores can avoid these problems by offering social login on websites.
Social login makes it easy for users to log in to a website using their preferred social network account without registering a new login account. It means they do not have to remember login credentials, especially for your website. Moreover, it will help you significantly diminish shopping cart abandonment.
However, one of the most significant benefits of social login is that it delivers customer insights by accessing the data sitting on their social profiles. Using this information, you can improve your customer’s shopping experience and the chances of buying the product.
2. Adding Social Plugins on Product Pages
Another great way to use social media for your eCommerce store is to add social plugins on each of your product pages. By placing ‘like’, ‘tweet’, ‘+1’ and ‘pin’ buttons on product pages, eCommerce retailers can gain exposure to a broader audience through word-of-mouth referrals by their customers.
Moreover, social opinion plays a vital role in purchasing decisions. When one sees a recommendation from a trusted source, they are more likely to buy the product. Adding social plugins to your product pages will build trust in your brand, increase referral traffic, expand your customer base, and build brand loyalty.
Eventbrite, an online ticketing service, is making excellent use of this feature. When visitors book tickets to upcoming concerts or conferences, the website prompts them to share their purchases via Twitter, Linked In, or email(with Like event and Share event buttons).
3. Use Social Media to Obtain Customer Generated Reviews
Consumers today check online reviews about a product before they go ahead and buy it. According to a study, about 95% of customers read reviews before purchasing. Moreover, all thoughts, whether positive or negative, are valuable for a social media store. Thus, the bad reviews lead to a 67% rise in conversion rates. People are looking for bad reviews as it makes them trust an online store more, while only good reviews cause suspicion of fake feedbacks.
Therefore, we recommend adding reviews by customers on individual product pages or creating a stunning testimonials page. You can even share these reviews across your social channels or vice versa add reviews from social media to your site. Showing reviews on it is not just a matter of convincing your potential customers. A lot of people actually expect to see ratings and reviews from other customers on eCommerce sites.
Power of Instagram Stories Highlights
These lifetime stories that users can review anytime are a fantastic tool for building trust and generating sales(on Instagram or on your site after following the link in bio). With its help, you can present all the valuable information – create highlights on all possible themes, f.e. How to Buy, Delivery Methods, Inspiration, About Us, Team, Tips, etc.
Still, every dedicated social media store page must have stories highlights called Reviews. Unlike a site, on Instagram sellers can provide screenshots of clients’ testimonials and photos and videos with your product. Without it, users don’t even start exploring the page and leave it.
Besides, we recommend creating branded highlight covers that will present your care about customers and a professional approach to every detail.
4. Offering Customer Service on Social Channels
There are many other ways of providing customer service, such as call centers or through personalized emails. But since social channels are transparent, providing customer service with these outlets will help you build a strong online reputation.
When you engage in conversation with your customers on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to resolve their issues, people who follow your business pages on different social networks will see how you deal with consumer complaints. When they realize you offer excellent customer service, your business has a greater chance of success. Also, satisfied customers will become strong brand advocates and spread the word about their positive experiences with your brand among their friends and family members.
5. Use Social Media to Incentivize Social Customers
Why do people follow a brand on social networks? If you think they do so simply because they like the brand, you are wrong. People follow brands on social networks for a particular reason; so, give your target audience a reason to follow your brand on social media.
Special Offers and Discounts
For example, entice customers into buying your products with coupon codes only available to those following you on social channels. It will increase your follower base and draw in more customers, thereby improving your store’s conversion rates. Alternatively, you can even provide free shipping options for your followers.
Free Tips, Recommendations, Overviews
Besides posts and stories highlights(f.e. Looks of the day if you sell clothes), we’d like to pay your attention to a new trend in social media called IGTV Stories which:
- makes it possible to share videos up to 1 hour long;
- offers you to add a title, as well as a description and hashtags to a video to increase reach;
- helps to boost user engagement.
Creating IGTV videos allows the brand to attract a larger audience. Among the pros of IGTV for Business are:
- Diverse content
Instagram Television allows you to show the user more interesting and valuable material related to the company than the usual videos in posts and stories.
- Analytics
Built-in video performance analysis tools help you better understand your audience and offer engaging content. IGTV provides regular statistics on engagement (number of views, likes, comments) and estimates audience retention. This makes it possible to understand at what point people stop watching your video.
6. Appeal to Social Media Influencers
Nowadays, bloggers have power, and they are the kings of social media networks. They can help you get more clients as today people trust them and rely on their recommendations.
Benefits of Working with Influencers
- Increased brand confidence. Bloggers often advertise products and services on their pages, and despite the obvious advertising, subscribers trust them. Influencers often confirm their words with video reviews and photos.
- Audience growth. Blogger subscribers can become your subscribers, but the content should meet their interests.
How to Choose the Right Blogger to Advertise Your Brand?
- First of all, evaluate the influencer’s page on the following parameters: subscribers, location, age, gender, and hobbies.
- Check blogger’s activity: comments, likes and feedback.
- Blog format. Find out the style of blogging, whether it is suitable for advertising your product or service.
- Advertising experience. View previous blogging ads and activity below them, or ask the influencer about its efficiency.
7. Displaying Instagram Galleries on Your Site
E-commerce stores should communicate visually with their visitors, as visuals are reported to impact shoppers’ behavior. The most common way of doing this is by adding high-quality product images to your site.
Another unique way is encouraging customers to post and share their pictures using your products on your social media store pages(Facebook or Instagram) and using these images to create a gallery on your business website. It makes incredible social proof, increasing conversion rates and product exposure on social networks. When consumers see photos of others using the product, they are most likely to buy that product.
For example, Madewell clothing company has a ‘Totewell’ section on its website, which has a gallery of user-submitted photos of how consumers are using their Madewell tote bags. Each of these images links to a shopping page from where visitors can buy that particular bag. Thus, users who submit an Instagram photo can have their photo credited on the site.
8. Leveraging YouTube to Showcase Your Product
One of the better ways that can help eCommerce sites increase sales is video marketing. YouTube has over 2.3 billion people access YouTube once a month. Videos help persuade nearly 84% of consumers to purchase a product or service, so you are missing out on a huge opportunity to convert potential shoppers into paying customers if you are not using videos on your site.
Videos are a powerful way of showcasing your product to your target audience. Apple, for instance, is effectively making use of YouTube to show ‘product use’ videos to target customers and thus generate sales. Make sure you enable the YouTube playlist feature to keep visitors on your own YouTube channel longer. Share these videos on your other social media to get more views and generate traffic to your eCommerce site.
Check this video to learn how to create a Youtube channel.
9. Leveraging Facebook Ads
Nowadays, there is an opportunity for businesses to use social media for advertising their products. Still, we’d like to consider it one of the largest ones in the world with a unique audience. Advertising on Facebook is yet another way of gaining brand exposure and attracting traffic to your site.
With Facebook ads, it has become possible for eCommerce stores to get powerful leads from the most popular social network on the planet. General social media posts do not have much impact as they are not targeted. Facebook ads can target users based on their gender, age, location, specific interest, relationship status, and several other factors! It means whether you opt for CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per Impression), you are bound to get qualified leads on your website.
Common Types of Ads on Facebook
- text with a high-quality image
- video
- slideshow
- stories
- gallery
- interactive ads
10. Running Contests and Promotions
Everyone likes getting something for free or winning a contest among a group of participants. So, promotional contests are a great way to gain exposure and drive traffic to your eCommerce site. Prizes can range from a t-shirt to a free coupon for your brand. A contest with an amazing prize is much more likely to entice people to participate and make them share it more.
Dove, for instance, hosted a contest called ‘Real Beauty Should Be Shared’. The competition asked fans to describe how a friend represented “real beauty”, and celebrated the natural beauty of real people. Winners were chosen to be the faces of Dove in a new campaign.
11. Using Twitter Cards
E-commerce stores can make use of a free and effective tool called Twitter cards. Twitter cards allow you to add rich media to your tweets and make them more appealing and engaging. With a Twitter card, you can describe a product in 200 words, which is a 43% increase in the number of characters you can use in a regular tweet. E-commerce brands can get a significant benefit from Twitter product cards, as they offer followers an easy way of sharing products with their network and allow them to view and share deals and the latest promotions without visiting a website.
12. Social Listening
Today, you can use social media channels to communicate with potential and current customers and form the brand’s reputation in different ways. With social listening, you can scan social media to define what users tell about your brand. It’s a good eCommerce social media strategy as due to it, you can improve client support, analyze which products are in demand and which ones you should work on.
13. Trying Ads on Tik Tok
Tik Tok has 689 million monthly active users and $1 billion revenue, quite impressive, isn’t it? It seems to be a strange and unreliable tool for some people, but most of them have already become involved in using this app. Advertising on Tik Tok isn’t for every business promotion, but it already has power and develops fast so that it can become a gold mine. You can choose from in-feed ads, brand takeover, branded hashtag challenges, and branded AR/effects content. The only demand is to create something extraordinary.
Bonus Point: Offering Different Social Features
Some online stores use social media innovative ideas to generate more sales for their business.
- eCommerce giant Amazon recently introduced a new feature that lets Twitter users add items to their Amazon carts by including a hashtag within a tweet.
- Flash sale site, turned eCommerce giant Fab, offers a social live feed feature that shows all the activities taking place on the site by shoppers. It’s a unique way for visitors to see what others are doing and buying on the site.
- Macy’s offers a feature, ‘Shop with your friends’, allowing shoppers to conduct a poll on social media for products they are interested in. It also allows shoppers to share these polls with their social networks.
How to Start?
- Define your goals – sell or share information and valuable tips.
- Decide on social media strategies.
- Figure out what channels it’s better to use – choose the one appreciated by your target audience.
- Optimize your social media accounts.
- Schedule, and automate the process of publishing posts.
- Check whether your site is mobile-friendly.
- Interact with users (answer their comments, questions, and reviews).
Expert Help with Social Brand Building from MotoCMS
If you want an impressive and modern social media page but don’t have time or enough knowledge to succeed, try our social media brand-building service and get:
- Profile avatars and username creation
- Bio & description copywriting
- FB cover image design
- Insta highlight covers the creation
- Fb & IG accounts connection
- Content Plan for one month
- Social media management (3-4 posts/week in total), up to 2 x platforms – design & copywriting
- Keywords & Hashtags planning
- One free revision for text and designs.
Our team is ready to incorporate all your requirements and make all the necessary changes to get pages with wow-effect.
A Few Words to Conclude
Social media plays a vital role in building a brand’s online presence, getting traffic, and generating leads, all of which collectively drive revenue for your business. Ignoring its use to drive the profitability of your online store will be a huge mistake. Undoubtedly, it’s more convenient to make an order on a website. Still, as users spend more time on social media, it’s essential to promote your page on social networks but add the link to your site in bio which ensures quality and a good customer experience.
Still Don’t Have Site – Enjoy Powerful Ecommerce Integration from MotoCMS
If you still don’t have an online store or want to improve a current one, look at MotoCMS eCommerce templates and start an eCommerce business right away.
Related posts:
- read a post about the eCommerce future to prepare for new challenges and metrics;
- find effective eCommerce design elements to wow visitors into converting.
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