eCommerce and social media go hand in hand. While eCommerce advertising is a major source of revenue for social networks, a huge chunk of product discovery and purchase is directly sourced from the audience on social media.
"Customers who have a positive interaction on social media are 3X more likely to purchase from and recommend a certain brand"
It is now clearly evident that one of the factors associated with success in eCommerce business is the understanding of social media and a well thought social strategy. In this article, we are listing some of the most effective best practices for social media for eCommerce brands in 2020. You can try and make any of these best practices work for your brand and win at social.
Strategize Your Content
Social media now delivers a personalized feed to each user based on the content they engage in. To stay relevant in your customer’s feeds, you need to personalize your content. Social networks offer a customized audience for your posts so you can connect with your audience better.
You can customize your social content based on the following parameters:
- Location
- Culture
- Age
- Engagement
- Device of use
These parameters can vary depending on your eCommerce business model.
Set Your Posting Schedule
Social media algorithms favor accounts that post regularly and stay active on their platform. The audience also enjoys your content and engages meaningfully when you share good content regularly. Although there are no fixed times for your posts, you can try and test various time slots and observe which ones work best for your audience. Putting your content out there at the best possible time is crucial at succeeding on social for eCommerce brands. Statusbrew allows you to create scheduling categories so your social media posts get published at the set time for the most engagement.
Engage With Your Audience
On social, people always prefer connection. They value engaging content than mere product advertisements, especially from eCommerce brands. To create delightful experiences on social for your customers, you need to attend a few key points and add them to your social media strategy.
- Create content that makes your audience engage and participate with your brand
- Make it a point to reply to comments and messages
- Address genuine feedback from your customers
- Have a voice in the industry and humanize your brand
You can try a mix and match of many different things to see which works best for your audience.
Become A Usage Focused Brand
Recently, with the rise of customer experience strategies in all the industries, it has become a trend on social media for eCommerce brands to be “Usage” focused. By being usage focused, this is what we mean. Initially, eCommerce brands were just concerned about the customer until the purchase of any product and used social media just to generate more sales. Now, the landscape is changing and brands are also considering the experience of using the products they sell. To become a usage focused eCommerce brand, you can start by putting product demonstrations, long term review videos, and tutorial related content on your social profiles.
Set Up Social Shopping
Social networks earn a high chunk of their revenue from eCommerce businesses. Hence, they are focused on bringing better features for integrating eCommerce brands on their platforms. One such integration is “Social Shopping”. Social shopping allows eCommerce brands to add their product catalog on their social media profiles and directly showcase products in their audience’s feeds. Social media users can directly buy the products from the social platform making the eCommerce buying experience smoother than ever.
Read more:
Use Influencer Marketing
The most effective way to win new customers for your eCommerce products on social media is to collaborate with influencers.
"Nearly 40% of Twitter users say they’ve made a purchase as a direct result of a Tweet from an influencer"
Depending on your marketing budget, you can choose to collaborate with influencers at any scale. You can choose from influencers with a few thousand to millions of followers. Finding influencers is easy and you can either reach them directly or use the following platforms.
- Database: inPowered, LittleBird, and Cision
- Marketplace: Tapinfluence, Mention, Brandwatch
Read more: How to Plan a Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy
Share User-Generated Content
Running out of ideas to post, or want to engage more people on your social profiles? User-generated content can be an effective way to attract new followers and engage with the existing ones. Sharing user content humanizes your brand as well as provides your audience with a platform to share their positive experiences using your products. This practice also enforces a feeling of trust for your brand in the social scene. Social contests and features are a great way of sharing your user content on your eCommerce brand’s social media.
Retargeting With Ads
Now that you have seen the best practices for eCommerce brands related to audience building and engagement, the next step is to help move the audience down in your marketing funnel and convert them into customers. The easiest conversions on social are the people who are already engaging with your content. Facebook explicitly provides retargeting options for your ads where they are only visible to the users who are engaging with your content or have visited your eCommerce store.
Also read: Facebook Ads vs Instagram Ads: Which One is Better For E-Commerce?
Automate Your Social Workflows
Managing multiple social media profiles for your eCommerce business can be a messy affair. Especially when you have multiple profiles on various social networks. Add multiple users to the mix and you get yourself into something that can hamper the productivity in your workspace. Many tools have been created to solve this problem and to help you stay consistent on social.
Statusbrew is a social media management platform that incorporates all your social media efforts together and adds in all the utilities you can wish for. It offers creating, planning, and scheduling your social media content, managing comments, replying to messages, approval workflows and delegation, extensive reporting, and a lot more.
Measure Social Progress
One of the key aspects of executing any social media strategy is monitoring it’s KPIs and molding the strategy constantly. Looking into your social media reports helps you understand your audience better and which content is working best for which segment and at what times. It also helps you understand the returns for your investment in a social media team and social advertising for your eCommerce business. Even though each social network provides some business insights for each profile, you need to see combined information for the bigger picture when you strategize social media for your eCommerce brand. You can try Statusbrew that offers exportable social media reports.
In conclusion, we hope that these best social media practices for eCommerce brands help you get better at social and improve your business. Feel free to share your best practices with us. Your comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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