If you run an eCommerce business, you would probably know how much importance social media holds these days for brand promotion. From boosting brand awareness to grabbing more conversions, social media has shown huge potential and played a crucial part in the eCommerce growth in recent years.
The reality is, businesses do understand its value but not everyone is able to capitalize on social media platforms. Social media is not just about random posting and advertising on Ad-hoc basis.
Some brands mark their presence on social media just because they feel it is a necessity or a trend that should be followed. Or maybe because their competitors have also set foot on some platforms.
Let me be very clear. If you are following the same approach, you are not going to get any benefit through it. Moreover, there is no point continuing with your social media pages if you do not have a plan and time to implement your social media marketing strategies.
Except that you use social media just to post random stuff about your brand or company’s inside stories, it would be better if you utilize that time at somewhere important. Do not start just for the sake of your brand presence.
In this article, I will be discussing some social media marketing strategies along with some useful social media practices to enhance your eCommerce business and take it to the next level.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
1. Set Your Goals
The primary social media marketing strategy would be deciding beforehand what you would like to achieve through social media. Whether your motive is to drive more inbound traffic to your website, increase followers count, generate leads or get sales, the plan to achieve the ultimate result should be clear from the very beginning.
Prepare a roadmap. Get a blueprint and start working accordingly. Moreover, focus only on those platforms which you feel are relevant to your business. There is no point in wasting time on Twitter if your target audience is on Facebook.
So put your time and effort on channels from where you can get desirable results. Do not focus on succeeding on every social platform.
2. Analyze Your Audience
Adding to the social media marketing strategies is analyzing your audience. Social media is spread across countries, and people of every age group spend time on social media. But is every age group relevant to your business?
As of now, Facebook has nearly 2.4 billion monthly users followed by Instagram with more than 1 billion monthly users. With such a vast user base, it becomes important to narrow down the demographics to reach the relevant target audience. If the majority of your business comes from people aged 20-35, targeting people over 50 would not make any sense.
For the informative purpose, Linkedin and Twitter can be beneficial, and if you are expecting higher engagement from the young community, there is no better option than Facebook and Instagram. It all depends on your niche and your audience base.
3. Create Quality Content
One of the common mistakes that businesses generally make is they focus only on promotion. Excessive promotion is a downside. It may take away the interest of your followers and you may lose out on potential customers.
Remember, social networks were not meant for selling but to connect with people. So, ensure you are providing quality content with a mixture of information and entertainment. Yes, promotion is necessary but do not sound like a salesman every time.
Brands who know how to keep the interest of their followers succeed in the social media platforms. Be witty, make attractive but useful posts, post videos. People react to what they like and what they find attractive which tends to bring more user engagement.
4. Have a Facebook Store and Instagram Shop
The Facebook business page consists of a “Shop Now” tab where brands can add their store products and promote them. Users can check out the products right from your brand page and are redirected to the website for buying purpose. The Facebook shop helps you drive more traffic to your website and generate more sales.
Similarly, you can consider the idea of Instagram shoppable posts that allow you to tag your products on the images, boosting product visibility. Consumers can now checkout directly from Instagram without getting redirected to the original website. But to have an Instagram Shop, you need to match the eligibility criteria defined by the Instagram community.
Facebook and Instagram Shop play crucial roles in your social media marketing strategy.
Read: The Pros and Cons of a Facebook store
Having a website on the PrestaShop or Magento platform and want to open a Facebook shop for your business, try out our PrestaShop Facebook store addon and Magento Facebook store extension.
Social Media Best Practices
1. Post at Regular Intervals
One of the basic social media best practices is to remain active. Post content at regular intervals, at least 1 piece of content daily or on alternate days.
Do not keep too much gap between your posts. It results in losing out followers and affects your brand image. When there is a long gap between posts, followers feel that you are not active and that there’s no point following you.
And it can cost you new followers too. If someone visits your brand page and finds out that you have been highly inactive, they would hardly be interested in following you.
You may or may not find it true but people stop engaging in posts when the posting frequency is too less.
2. Use Appealing Visuals for your Posts
I would not even bother to pay a look at a post that contains untidy visuals, let alone engaging with it. But if I find a post having great visuals, I would surely stop for a moment while scrolling through my feed. This is why visuals make one of the most important social media best practices. They tend to grab user attention.
Use high-quality pictures and colours that are pleasing to the eyes. Avoid writing too much text on pictures and make sure you are using the appropriate image size. Different social media platforms have different image sizes set for proper display.
3. Use Hashtags
The game of hashtags is very interesting and popular on social media. Hashtags are generally user-generated tagging which makes it possible for users to find posts or messages regarding a specific theme, content or news. It gives you a wide organic reach and increases viewership.
Hashtags play a crucial role in social media sites like Twitter and Instagram. When people use a particular hashtag for search, all the relevant content associated with that hashtag appears in front of the user. This makes it easy for people to filter out what exactly they want to look for.
Hashtags are an ACE for user-generated content campaigns.
4. Engage with your Audience
Social media is all about interacting with each other. People don’t use social media to just read or watch. Interaction is important. Successful businesses care a lot about their audience and they like interacting with their followers.
Ask questions, organize quizzes, participate in discussions, reply to users’ queries in comments. Join people in their conversations and show them your human side instead of sending automated answers.
Try to come up live on Facebook and Instagram, look for their questions and answer them at that very moment.
5. Find the Right Time to Post
Post at the right time is crucial to get a higher reach. The right time, here, means the time when a majority of your followers are active on social media. The reach of your posts would be very less if they aren’t posted at an appropriate time.
So, what’s the ideal time to post? You can find the best time to post on different social media platforms on CoSchedule Blog. You should also use social media tools like Buffer and Hootsuite for post scheduling.
6. Boost Posts That Are Performing Well
You want more and more people to see your content, right? Social media ads would help you do so. You may argue that spending money on boosting posts would be a waste of money until you are expecting an ROI from it but sometimes, reach is more important than the results.
I am not suggesting spending huge bucks, a little amount that too on well-performing posts would do great.
Final word
Utilizing social media platforms can be a big boost for your online business. All you need to do is follow the right approach and implement the right tactics. This will help you drive more traffic and conversions and increased brand awareness.
Hope you enjoyed reading the social media marketing strategies and best practices. If you found this information useful and have any point to add, let me know in the comments below.
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