6 Ways How to Integrate Social Media with Your Online Store
For a thriving e-commerce site, taking advantage of social media sites is one of the most effective means to grab a good number of customers and reach the sales’ target. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, along with many others, are highly effective platforms to serve as your hub for all your e-commerce engagements.
Because social media sites are where majority of internet users spend their online time, syncing your e-commerce website with these is a sure way to reach out your audience and increase your revenue. It can be relatively simple to work on especially if you understand your audience. Social media works best with a well-rounded marketing strategy. Here are several effective methods to productively use social media for your online store promotion.
1. Have a separate Twitter account for customer service
Gone are the days when customers would actually have to call a company to complain. Most product subscribers are more inclined to rant all their problems to social media, thus easily spreading their negative feedback to the world. For this, always be on the lookout and be quick to address their concerns before they let complaints fester on the World Wide Web.
To address this issue, apart from your fan pages and accounts for hashtag generators, make a twitter account solely dedicated to addressing your customers’ concerns. Using these separate accounts in handling concerns has become a prevalent trend in the business world. In fact, 99% of brands are on Twitter and 30% of them have an account dedicated to customer service.
2. Place “Share” buttons where they won't disturb your customers’ purchasing experience
Optimize your social media call-to-actions, and take it easy on the size and location of it on your website. You do not want to interfere your customers’ purchase transaction. When your button sizes are small yet visible enough, it enables your customers to continue with their purchasing transaction without hassle. Keep it that way.
3. Make “Share” buttons available on the checkout page
Allowing your customers to share their purchase transactions is another good way to promote social awareness of your brand. Because a majority of online buyers maintain at least one social media account, social share buttons give them the ability to conveniently share their activities to their friends and acquaintances who most likely have the same interest with them. Of course, this gives you an added benefit of furthering your website advertisement.
When your customers have already felt confident enough to buy your product, they will be more likely to be in the mood to express comfortability and excitement, thus inclining them to share their activity on social media. So why not offer them a nice free gift, free shipping or discount code, if they share their cart on social media, to encourage them to check out, kill 68% cart abandonment and increase your conversion rate at the same time?
4.Provide third-party social media based comment systems
Another helpful technique on social media promotion is to get your website visitors engage with each other via their social media account. If your target demographics are active social media netizens, providing a comment thread that is directly linked to their Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ accounts does not only help with your advertisements but also builds the reliability of your web page. Visitors reading comments and testaments and engaging in conversation in your website will develop a comfortability in patronizing your services.
5.Use campaign hashtags
If you haven’t heard of trending hashtags, it pays well to go out of your offline cave and check on what this fuzz is all about. Hashtag is a useful tool to easily deliver a campaign and promote awareness regarding important issues and advocacies. No wonder this has been one of the favorite marketing strategies used by international companies to promote their latest offers. Utilize it like Amazon did, where they help customers add products to wish list straight from Twitter with only 2 simple steps:
6. Leverage on your discount promotion to build social followers
Are you having a great discount promotion? Perfect! Now let’s think of some ways you can use it to grow a strong base of social followers that are potential customers. One way to do this is adding a popup that asks your visitors to like you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or subscribe to your email newsletter. You are killing two birds with one stone: making it easier to build social media profile from scratch and giving your customers great incentives to buy something. Now, you should be expecting more sales to come since these followers are likely to convert into paying customers in the future.
Conclusion:
Gaining a good number of customers for your e-commerce website can be compared to a fisherman in the middle of a vast sea in the dead of the night. The fisherman does not need to go fishing in every part of the ocean. He just needs to find that one spot to cast his net on where a great number of fishes gather. Similarly, you do not need to go all the way advertising your website in every possible corner of the internet. It will only incur unnecessary investment cost with no certainty of a good return. You just have to get to where a large number of your target demographics gather and make your business visible. With proper strategies on social media advertising, sooner, you will be watching a good number of customers checking on and talking about your products and services.
What do you think about these tips? Comment and share with us what you do to optimize social media on your online store!
