Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram have seem to be the buzzwords since the past couple of years. These sites serve as a sharing and communicating platform between online retailers and consumers. Social media is shaping and transforming the ways people market their business globally. With these changes happening, it’s time to set some useful social media strategies as a part of eCommerce marketing. Below listed are some great social media tips, if you can have a look
1. Know Which Social Media Your Customers Are Involved In
Marketing becomes a success only if you target at places where your customers are located. If you don’t have a customer base on that channel where you are utilizing your time and resources, it won’t provide you with any benefits.
For getting a better insight of knowing which social media your customers are currently using, you can implement the use of social media monitoring tools. These tools help you give a better understanding of what people are saying about your business and exactly where those people are saying. Some best social media monitoring tools which can be used are-
Twitter Advanced Search-
With this tool, you can perform some powerful searches.
Google Reader-
Google reader allows you to have all the information you need in one place by subscribing to RSS feeds of your competitor’s site, Twitter searches, news sites, top blogs and many more. It also provides the ability to subscribe to searches on sites like YouTube and Flickr.
Social Mention-
This tool tracks mainstream news, audio, video, blog comments, Twitter and images.
2. Keep Track of your Competitors
If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, it is crucial for you to keep a track of what they are doing and what are their marketing strategies?
Conducting market research on your industry and connect with your competitors is a great way to make your business stand out from others. Keeping track of competitor’s latest blogs and tweets is essential to better position your business. Being aware of what your business may provide to your customers that other competitors cannot and profit from these points.
3. Paid Advertisements and Promotions
Social media networks play a significant role to promote specific campaigns to people whose interest matches your product offering. For marketing, social media ads can be used to help you reach your targeted audiences based on location, age, gender, interests and so on. Similarly Twitter can be used for promoting tweets on your product service and offerings. This provides an interactive platform between you and your customers. By promoting your business with targeted Facebook and Twitter ads, you will be able to create a huge customer base for your online business.
4. Promote Social Offers and Discounts Socially
People buy deals that attract them the most. Same goes with social commerce and online marketing. In order to promote something unique, you can think of different strategies that will influence customers to go for online shopping. One such example is to promote an event-based contest and ask people’s opinions on it. This will help you increase the number of fans on your page.
5. Do not just push promotions
Though the main objective of your eCommerce website is to sell your products, it does not mean that you have to push them to your customers. An ideal way to promote your offerings is to go for customer engagement. For allowing customers to engage and interact with your site, all you can do is-
- Include discussions among customers by conducting surveys or putting up a questionnaire
- Include photos and videos of your products
Create an online group and let your customers speak about your products.
Conclusion-
If your business deals with social commerce, then there are high chances that your customers participate actively in social media networks. Social networking platform allow your business to expand its reach, regardless of the age, gender or location of its audience. Following these tips will surely help you succeed in the world of social commerce.