Social media is paramount for e-commerce, its significance has grown to mammoth proportions over the years with its ability to reach specialized pools of consumers.
Brands that relied on traditional forms of advertising to further their base have taken to optimizing their brand to fit into different social media niches on the web. E-commerce brands can target consumer collectives with a range of purchasing capacities through planned social media strategies.
These social media strategies should aid in developing healthy patterns of online engagement:
Wholesome amalgamation of content
When customers sign up to follow different portals on your brand’s social media portfolio, the content on these platforms should not pertain entirely to posts on your brand. This would tire your audience, and deviate your campaign from following a pattern of organic engagement.
Providing external content that induces user sharing, would keep your platforms consumer engagement at optimal levels, furthering user interaction with posts pertaining to your e-commerce venture.
Here are a few user poll statistics that establish positive content-client interaction:
- 61% followers admitted to buying a product because they found the brands’ content interface engaging.
- 78% consumers bought the product after being directly influenced by the brands’ social media content.
- An e-commerce’s social media platform accounted for 1 out of 10 customers directed towards the site.
If the engagement levels on your social media campaigns deteriorate, it will also affect the reach on your new posts since Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc, push content based on follower engagement formulae.
To capture the niche space on a user’s feed, e-commerce brands have to constantly engage followers with shareable content in the form of original or recycled articles, listicles, and micro-content. Posting engageable social media content frequently will push an organic stream of consumers to your online store.
However, being at all these (social) places all at once is a challenge. There are many social media publishing software that you can use to schedule posts in advance and have a filled content calendar for each social profile.
Factoring in SEO strategies
Search Engine Optimisation can be improved in leaps and bounds through social media, the higher the quality of follower to brand engagement on a social media platform, the greater the boost to page rating and visibility.
The number of followers does not count as much as their organic interactivity as followers.
In Google’s search ranking, external inbound links play a huge part in generating traffic, but these links should encourage quality engagement to make a significant difference towards optimization.
Additionally, using local listings, hashtags, keywords etc, to make your content easier to search and share can boost your brand’s SEO.
Create a culture of reviews
Social media reviews act like digital crumbs to followers, if the engagement on the review is positive it has the potential to convert a follower into a customer. If your brand sells on many e-commerce portals, encourage customers to leave feedback and reviews on their purchases.
Study has it that nearly 70% of customers base their purchasing decision on products that attract the most amount of reviews on e-commerce portals.
Widgets that connect and sync reviews and customer engagement by stringing it, through your social media platforms and e-commerce page can build bulk reviews, often a single portal might attract more reviews and customers who seek out reviews on a different portal featuring your brand might miss out on reading positive customer feedback and choose brands with better reviews on that particular platform.
Does your brand have an online persona?
Expecting a brand to have an online persona might sound far-fetched to most, but the formulas of most successful engagement portals such as BuzzFeed, are often identified by their content creators who have formed a human face to the brand, thus drawing viral engagement towards the platform.
In such a case, the virality of their content does not happen by chance, the entire brand is built around the sole attribute of generating viral engagement with every post.
Unlike news websites and other online platforms that engage a large quota of an audience, brands that portray a human face tend to pull in followers that connect with the brand, like they would connect to a person.
For example, makeup brands launched by specific people tend to be more successful and pull in better engagement, than those that have an organizational base to their brands.
In fact, 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are even likely to recommend it to others.
Communicate with your followers
Brands that are faceless attract less direct customers since followers looking to purchase on an e-commerce portal look out for receptive service representatives to solve their queries.
Thus answering queries and engaging directly with followers who comment and share your content would promote the image of a reliable vendor and an enthusiastic troubleshooter.
Hosting live videos have become a popular method for e-commerce brands to induce immediate engagement, such direct strategies put a face to the product and render trust which will result in prospective customers.
To reach such a goal, the brand’s human representatives should actively participate and answer questions in discussions that arise as a result of a follower-content interaction.
Followers tend to engage more with brands that respond on social media, Twitter is exclusively used towards this agenda. When you have a presence on more than one channel, it gets difficult to handle engagement from different social profiles. It is best to manage all of it from one place using a good social media management software.
Pay for advertising
Social media pages that derive their traffic from viral micro-content and visual pictures and videos don’t essentially possess organic followers to benefit e-commerce ventures. Mass consumers consume viral content, but very few followers make the leap towards becoming customers.
Even if your e-commerce venture has structured social media content creation formulas, and fulfill every strategy laid out in this article, without paid advertisements most ventures do not pull in suitable pools of followers to customer quotas. For instance, over 70 million businesses have Facebook pages.
In fact, Facebook has refined its advertising strategy into micro formulas, allowing followers, who are attracted by your brand, to engage with your brand’s content.
Paid social media advertising will help in surpassing these limits, by signaling to these platforms to engage potential new followers, indirectly such social media sites also allow for better engagement with old followers of your brand’s page.
In addition, paid advertising often reaches out towards new followers who are more dynamic and procreative in their engagement with the brand, which indirectly creates more positive shares and follower engagement with the content, thereby creating a cycle of organic engagement that is essentially complete because of its potential to sustain routine active engagement.
Moreover, the web-savvy follower will always do their research before committing to purchase a product from an e-commerce portal. This makes it extremely important to sculpt your social media strategy into patterns that engage the audience with content that would enable customer research into your product, and push your brands content to reflect positively across the web.
Negative reviews and customer feedback would kill a product, specialized SEO optimisation can drive followers towards positive content on your e-commerce brand.
Enrich Content with Images
Images can really make your content stand out. PikWizard is a free photo and video site with a quality collection of stock media. All footage and photos are completely free for use without need of attribution. Their collection of over 100,000 free images have over 20,000 images that are completely exclusive to PikWizard with a huge variety of themes and media libraries.
Closing note
It is important to be competitive in e-commerce and integrating social into your marketing strategy is critical. With the right strategy, content, and social media management tools, you can build your brand and ultimately grow your business.
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Monica Maria is the Content and ‘PR’oduct birdie at SMhack. She enjoys everything and anything social. When she isn’t writing, you can find her reading poetry or taking photographs.
You can connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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