How to Use Social Media Effectively for E-commerce

Introduction

Today, social media spending makes up a small fraction of most businesses’ marketing budgets. On average, social media spending accounted for just 9-11% of the overall budget. However, that number is projected to expand to nearly 22% within the next five years. Clearly, e-commerce marketers recognize the power of social media to connect with an audience. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram are nearly omnipresent in our lives. They are akin to the 21st-Century Main Street; we use them to communicate, find information quickly, and increasingly, to shop for products. For internet businesses, effective social marketing represents real value. Social networks provide new ways to reach first-time customers, engage and reward existing customers, and showcase the best your brand has to offer. Your social network profiles and the content you share are as important as a business’s front display and showcases in the 1950s. Why? (Smith, 2020)

The Rise of Social Media as Commerce Portals

Social networks are evolving from just places to find and distribute content; they are becoming commerce portals. Businesses that integrate social media into their marketing strategy—from customer acquisition to sales to re-engagement campaigns—will benefit. Here are a few ways e-commerce businesses can maximize their social marketing efforts:

Finding and Engaging Customers

Go where your customers are. It’s a marketing maxim, and it’s never been easier to accomplish than today. There are various ways social media can enhance the way you interact with customers, whether they are first-time buyers or loyal fans. Here are a few examples:

Customer Research

Marketers can see in real-time what your audience cares about most, their interests, the conversations they’re having, and what they like. Use your social networks to better segment your audience and understand your target demographics. This will help you optimize your campaigns and deliver more targeted messaging (Johnson, 2019).

Customer Service

Immediacy is crucial in social media; we want information, and we want it now. That’s why networks are so great for customer service. They allow businesses to quickly respond to customer inquiries. Plus, social media makes it easier to identify and respond to negative customer experiences. Develop a strategy for responding to customer inquiries via social media.

Customer Acquisition

Your social profile is essentially your storefront. Customers are now using social networks to research companies and products. Your Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social pages provide the perfect opportunity to make a lasting impression. Begin by optimizing your profiles and making necessary information easy to find. Also, encourage your existing customers to review your company on Facebook, Google, or Yelp (Anderson, 2018).

Customer Engagement

Don’t think of social media as merely another way to generate sales and drive traffic. Use these platforms to demonstrate value and validate your marketing efforts. Consider the camera maker who rarely shares content designed to sell products. Instead, their posts highlight the best quality videos and photos taken with their cameras, effectively showcasing the brand.

Develop a social content strategy that is designed to highlight the best, most unique, and most beautiful aspects of your brand. And remember, you don’t have to do it all yourself; curation can be an extremely valuable tool.

Paid Advertising Optimization

The days of free marketing on social sites are numbered. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have all made paid advertising a more significant part of their businesses, and e-commerce marketers will likely need to increase their paid advertising spends to reach the same audience. There are several benefits to paid advertising on social networks:

Improved Segmenting

Think about it: Facebook and LinkedIn have made it much easier for marketers to target customer segments by age, location, interests, job title, and much more. Video advertising is becoming more sophisticated. There are a few reasons for this. First, video is an incredible way to showcase your products. Customers are researching the products they purchase online more thoroughly these days, and video provides an interactive way to see these products in action before they buy. In addition, video is much more engaging than text, and when your audience is more engaged, conversion follows (Miller, 2021).

More Accurate Social Data Analytics

A number of tech companies are creating products that enable marketers to measure every aspect of their social campaigns—from top-performing networks to the types of social content that work, and the actions that customers take. These types of social data analytics tools make it easier for e-commerce marketers to tie social campaigns to results.

Distributing Content Effectively

It’s been said that every brand is a publisher, and today, anyone with an internet connection and a social profile is a publisher. Take a look at Starbucks, the coffee company. They don’t just sell coffee; Starbucks is an Instagram rock-star, as one of the most-followed brands on the site. Today, it’s very easy for businesses to create content and distribute it directly to their audiences. We can look at GoPro again. They produce and curate more effectively than most on the GoPro Channel. The channel features videos shot on the brand’s camera, both by amateurs and the GoPro team. This content is shareable, engaging, and creates incredible brand visibility. Then, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the company has built up a stellar following. Of course, it’s easier to share an extreme sports video than, say, a picture of vitamins, but social networks open up endless opportunities to distribute content.

Use your social networks to showcase your brand and distribute the best, most engaging blogs, photos, videos, infographics, and multimedia you can produce. If one type of content doesn’t work for your niche, like vitamins and nutrients, then perhaps an incredible infographic is the way to go. Find the content that best matches your niche. Plus, content curation—finding the most useful or interesting content on a specific topic—creates value for your potential audience (Brown, 2022).

Conclusion

Here’s an example from the Shopify blog. STORQ, a company that sells stylish clothes to expecting mothers, curates content about pregnancy. Their newsletters create real value for their target market. By using curation, your business adds value and gives potential customers another reason to follow your brand. Staying ahead of the curve means experimenting with the way you interact with customers, advertise, and publish content. The internet makes it easier to test, optimize, and test again. And now, the latest technology, like social analytics and content publication tools, have put marketers in a position to truly measure their social marketing reach (Taylor, 2023).