Social media is one of your best weapons if you’re in the business of eCommerce. You can use social media platforms to reach new customers, nurture customers, and turn leads into lifetime customers who keep on coming back.
Your customers are already on social media, while the platforms themselves are fully-loaded with features, tools and resources that are designed to make your life as easy as possible when it comes to finding audiences, engaging them – and selling to them.
In this article, you’ll learn about the importance of social selling (and why 8 out of 10 businesses plan to sell on social media this year), how to be social and engaging on social media (and not intrusive), as well as how to master the various social media platforms and post native content through social media etiquette tips.
By the end of the article, you’ll be ready to put a solid social media strategy into action – one that informs and educates your audience, and boosts conversions.
Be Social
The thing with social media is that your followers primarily sign-up to social platforms in order to be social.
In other words, they sign-up to chat with their friends, share pictures and stay in the loop with social happenings.
However, research has shown that over 20,000,000,000 messages are exchanged each month between customers and businesses.
This clearly demonstrates that, while people use social media to chat with their mates, they also use it to interact with brands – and make purchases.
Here’s another thing with social media: it doesn’t matter how many followers you’ve got. What truly matters is how many engaged followers you have. How many of your followers are leaving comments, “likes” and sharing your posts?
How many of your followers are actually interacting with you?
If the answer is “not many,” now is the time to start engaging them by being more social.
Now, the obvious route here is to start chatting to your followers – responding to comments, saying Hello, and so on.
This, however, is time-consuming, and it might not always yield the desired results. But – it’s a good start.
Here are some more tips for audience engagement:
- Practice social listening. Social listening means finding conversations related to your brand and niche (you can use social listening tools to help you track down these conversations), and then getting involved in the convo. Instead of simply saying “thank you,” if someone has praised your brand, though, respond with a question to fire the conversation in a new direction.
- Use emojis. Is it corny and weird for a brand to use emojis when responding to comments left by followers on social media? Does it make it look as though you’re trying a little too hard? Absolutely not! Emojis are a lot of fun, and they go a long way to helping you express tone and intent. Plus, your followers use emojis all the time when chatting with their mates. Who’s to say that, just because you’re a business, your conversations have to be so formal all the time?
- Use GIFS. Similar to emojis, you can use GIFs to inject a bit of fun into your interactions with your customers. Remember, the funnier and on-point a GIF is, the better it will hit.
- Prepare comments in advance. No, you don’t want to prepare every comment in advance, because this will make you look robotic and impersonal. But if you receive common comments, such as “love this!” it’s always a good idea to have a range of stock comments prepared in advance so that you don’t need to spend all day replying to people with something new.
- Respond to negative comments. As well as responding to positive comments, it’s important to – from time to time – respond to negative comments as well. Why? Because if you leave a negative comment open for everyone to see, it reflects badly on your brand. By responding to it, you can clear the issue up, and offer advice, while at the same time showing everyone that you truly care. If you don’t respond, the issue is left unchecked, and people may form a negative opinion of your brand.
- Invite your followers to start a conversation. Messenger for businesses is a key tool that allows you to start conversations with your customers, answer their queries, and nudge them closer towards a sale. However, while you should always make it easy for them to start a convo with you, social media etiquette requires that you never bombard them with messages.
eCommerce brand Sugar Cosmetics makes it easy for their followers to start a conversation in a non-invasive way. Source
To understand how effective your strategies are, it’s important to monitor metrics such as engagement, reach, and clicks.
Publish Valuable Content
Great content is a real asset in the world of social media, where everyone can post anything at any time of the day. In fact, great content that offers lots of value to the end-user is one of the best ways an eCommerce store can stand out on social platforms.
Naturally, we understand that it’s not always easy to publish valuable content on social media due to the limitations. Research has indeed shown that the optimal Facebook post length is just 50 characters. That really doesn’t give you much room at all.
But the benefits of publishing high-quality content on social media are manyfold:
- You’ll attract a bigger audience
- Your audience will keep following you
- Your audience will share your posts
- Your audience will learn to trust you
- Your audience will begin to see you as the expert in your niche
We’ll get into the types of content you should be publishing on social media in a moment, but you need to start by knowing exactly who your audience is. Who’s interested in your products? What problems are you solving for them? How are you solving them?
Spend some time defining your audience’s demographic, including their age-range, their passions, and how much they earn.
Then, it’s time to start catching people’s attention via interesting and useful content that adds value to their experience. This can mean content that:
- Educates people
- Introduces them to your niche
- Introduces them to YOU
- Demonstrates how your products solve their biggest problems
Woolrich share the benefits of their latest products with their followers, along with links in the image to the product (jacket and shirt) Source
But valuable content is also content that informs your audience of things like:
- Discounts
- Deals
- Shipping times
- Returns policies
This is all key information that’s crucial for your audience to know. And when you share it on social media, you’re showing that you’re a transparent eCommerce business.
Other things you can share include information related to your customer service. For example, if you’ve recently installed a chat widget to improve customer support, let people know.
And hey – if your store is sustainable and the practice of sustainability is important to you, this is another thing you can share on social media. Just like Starbucks does on a regular basis:
Understand Each Platform Thoroughly
Not all social media channels are the same. In fact, they’re all very different and have different uses. Etiquette dictates you follow how people post and share on these networks, so you avoid issues and fit in with your targets.
And while your audience might be on each and every channel, how you interact with them – and even find them – must be different. For instance, you can implement an Instagram SEO strategy to find your audience on IG.
This type of thing is one part of a smarter social media strategy, and it will enable you to reach more people, engage more people – and boost your conversions.
Brand perception is key. And unless you get used to posting native content on each channel, your brand will be perceived either wrongly or indifferently by the very people you’re trying to win over.
Sportswear giant Nike is well-known for posting eye-catching visuals to their Instagram, while telling stories that complement the images. Source
For example, while Facebook is useful for sharing long-form posts, Twitter is great for posting polls and responding to customer queries due to its nature. You can also use Twitter to post micro-blogs, share links to your products, and share stats and data.
Instagram, meanwhile, is one of the best places on the internet to live stream, host interviews with relevant people in your niche, share “how-to” videos that introduce people to your products, and post Stories.
Naturally, you should also be as visual as possible on Instagram, and share high-quality pictures of your products, as well as customers using your products.
Instagram is perfect for user-generated content, too, as well as recruiting influencers who can spread the word further and help you attract more customers.
Essentially, it’s all about making sure you understand each social media platform and how it needs to be used. This also means understanding which social media platforms to use – and which not to use.
This is a salient point because it’s not necessary for online merchants to use every single platform. If your audience isn’t on Tik Tok, or if your store isn’t really a fit for Tik Tok – you don’t have to use it.
In a nutshell, you need to:
- Understand your social media goals, as this will help you decide which channels to use
- Get thoroughly acquainted with each social media channel. Check out your competitors to see how they use each channel. What type of content do they post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on? How do they interact with their followers on these channels?
- Make use of each social media platform’s eCommerce features. For example, Instagram has a Live Shopping feature, and a Checkout feature.
Understand How to Use Ads
Social media users don’t want to be bombarded with irrelevant ads. When you promote your content to people who have no real interest in what you’re selling, you could damage your brand and reputation, waste time and money – and miss out on conversions.
And yet, you need to use ads to reach a wider audience and generate more leads. So what can you do?
The good news is that 57% of social media users don’t actually wish to block ads altogether. Instead, they’d rather just filter them. This means that, provided you can create the right ads that are targeted at the right people, you can make a success of social media advertising.
Brands need to understand how to choose the right type of ads, how to use them, and how to target the right audience.
To do this, you can make use of the advanced ad tools inherent in social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. These tools will help you to narrow down your target audience, set a budget, and track the performance of your ads.
They will also help you create objectives – and reach them. For example, an objective might be conversion-oriented, which means you’ll want to create an ad that encourages people to take direct action, such as adding a product to their cart.
Or, you might set a catalog sales objective, which pulls products from your catalog into one of your social media ads.
You might also create ads designed to build awareness of your eCommerce store.
Pro tip: Try to avoid the really annoyingly intrusive ads that get on people’s nerves the most, including pop-up ads, mobile ads, and autoplaying video ads.
And just remember that the likes of Facebook and Instagram come with some pretty robust advertising toolkits. Make sure you make the most of these.
Sell Your Products Directly on Social Media – Carefully
As mentioned, people sign up to social platforms to be social first and foremost. As such, brands must be very careful with how they use social selling.
Should you even use social selling in the first place?
Yes. Social media has created more selling opportunities than ever before, giving you the opportunity to reach more customers – and potentially outdo your rivals who haven’t mastered social media yet.
However, there is an art to social selling, and it centers on building relationships with your customers – as opposed to simply going in for the direct sale.
What does this mean?
It means using content, engagement, and general marketing tactics to create meaningful interactions with your sales prospects so that they begin to trust you and see you and your products as the solution to their problems.
Over time, you can sell and build customer loyalty via social media.
All that we’ve discussed in this article ties into social selling:
- Engage your followers. Get involved in conversations, ask questions and interact with people
- Create and post valuable content that helps people
- Use content to position yourself as the expert in your niche
- Use the right platforms – and use them correctly
It’s by developing meaningful, lasting relationships that customers will come to you – as opposed to you going to them. Instead of selling to them, you just need to build bonds with them.
Of course, you will need to promote posts that come with clear CTAs, too, such as “Shop Now”, which encourage people to make a purchase from you. But this should only be done once you’ve got their trust and confidence.
Wrapping Up Social Media Etiquette Tips
It’s well worth mentioning that you need to appear “always-on” as much as possible on social media. This will ensure your audience never forgets about you, and it can help you to stand out from the competition.
Naturally, being always on – as well as implementing the tips suggested above – can present a challenge, but understanding what to post, when to post, and how to interact with your customers is key to a successful social media campaign.
Don’t forget that you can work with a social media manager who will help you get the most out of each platform, help you create campaigns, monitor campaigns, and make the necessary adjustments going forward.