In today’s market, ecommerce businesses need more than just a website to be successful. Social media is an essential component of any business. While some companies only use social sites for advertising, others host their business exclusively on these platforms. Whatever your business model, if you want to be relevant today, you must incorporate social media in some way. Just about everyone with a smartphone has at least one social media account. With 3.8 billion smartphone users out there, no business can afford to ignore so many potential customers. Read on to learn helpful strategies to set up your ecommerce business for success in 2024.
Make a Plan
Planning is essential when it comes to social media. Creating and designing eye-catching content is not a one-and-done kind of activity. You must regularly come up with fresh ideas to keep people interested. Organization is key, and the best-performing brands set up a calendar to keep track of their content. A simple Excel spreadsheet may be all you need, but you might also prefer to subscribe to a project management platform like Zoho. Social media sites also offer useful tools. Be sure to keep track of all holidays, major and minor. This is especially important if your business is international. For example, Mother’s Day falls in May in the US, March in Russia, and October in Argentina. A pearl retailer like The Pearl Source would want to have all those dates charted to not miss out on any opportunities.
Brand Everything
Your logo is the public face of your brand. It is what people recognize, and will ideally associate with credibility and reliability. The logo you use should be identical on every site, no matter if it’s on your ecommerce shopfront or your social media channels. That goes for colors, fonts, vision statement, everything. The one thing you never want to happen is for a customer to arrive at your site and feel lost. Everything should look familiar, reassuring the customer they’re in the right place. Add your logo to all your visual content as well, including product images. Don’t love your design? Get help from tools like Canva and Logo Maker to create a professional-looking one.
Interact With Customers
The original intent of social media was to connect people. For businesses, these platforms offer a great way to build relationships and trust. Spending time with customers shows you care about them. Answer questions. Join conversations. Take your time responding to comments on feeds. Be the brand that listens to its customers. Tools like Social Mention can help you zero in on relevant conversations. When interacting with customers, be sure to use the right tone: be friendly, funny, and upbeat. Even if customer comments come across as insulting, never respond with anger. Show empathy toward a frustrated consumer. It’ll boost your public image, and show other potential customers that you’re someone they’d like to do business with.
Embed Buttons
When a customer wants to find out more about your brand or one of your products, it’s helpful to have at least a couple of social buttons available to click. Adding social buttons to your product pages is incredibly easy. But, you may be thinking, isn’t that distracting? After all, you want to keep people on your site. Most customers don’t buy on their first visit to an online store, and a whopping 80% will abandon carts with items in them. Adding social channels to your site gives customers a chance to learn more about your business. If they read positive things about your brand, they’re more likely to return and make a purchase.
Share Reviews
These days, people trust reviews more than descriptions created by the business. Some 70% of consumers say they read product reviews before buying, and 90% say reviews influence their decision on whether or not to make a purchase. Positive reviews can go a long way toward creating success for your business. Build trust with customers by featuring ratings and reviews on social media. Video testimonials are particularly powerful. One way to create social proof is by searching for relevant hashtags and brand mentions. By sharing content created by customers, you earn more trust. Added bonus: it doesn’t take much work on your part.
Adopt Video
People now use their mobile phones more than desktop devices to browse and shop. This shift toward cellphones means that consumers prefer content that is easy to see on a small screen. Storytelling tools on social media have been developed expressly to attract these users. Brief, engaging videos like those on Snapchat and Tik Tok are extremely popular. Playful content is a great way to boost your business, and live videos are especially appealing. People love real-time interaction, and having a face to associate with a brand also helps build trust. Emojis, colorful text, gifs, and other appealing interactive elements are crucial for capturing that ever-decreasing attention span. Important: keep videos short. Most don’t last more than 20-30 seconds. If you must go longer, consider creating a series of shorter clips.
Feed Social Media into Your Website
One of the main reasons you should have social media feeds on your site is because you have more control over how your brand is presented there than elsewhere. On other sites such as YouTube, you risk losing out on views because there’s so much competing content. When you have a YouTube feed on your website, you have a much better chance of retaining your audience for longer. Potential buyers like to see regular people using a product. Adding social media feeds to your ecommerce website increases content and boosts interaction with customers. To install the feeds, you can either code manually or use plug-ins. It bears repeating that endorsements from social media reinforce trust.
A professional logo and branding increase familiarity while embedded buttons and social media feeds increase trust and keep customers on your site. Use these tips to be successful with gaining new customers and developing long-term relationships with existing ones.
Nicola Holder 