Social media marketing is something that uses up very little time and if done correctly, can give you huge success in your eCommerce business. But even though there is little investment in using this tool, it can be detrimental to your business if you don’t know what you are doing. Here are five tips that will help you succeed with social media marketing for an eCommerce venture.
Meet Your Customers on Their Turf
If you want your customers to interact with you on social media, you have to go where they are. There are literally thousands of social networking sites out there for you to choose from, but make sure that you aren’t choosing one for the wrong reasons.
You want to choose social media to sign up with that you know your customers are already using. How do you know? There are a few good ways. You can use a social monitoring tool that will tell you which social networks are discussing your business, or you could simply ask your customers where they congregate with a poll or email survey.
Check Out the Competition
You might not be able to peek into the R&D labs and executive boardrooms of your main competitors, but you can easily check them out on social media.
Find out what social media sites they are most active in and determine what they decide to publish on their social media sites with special emphasis on what type of content they decide to publish on which social media platform. You also can check out their numbers and find out what you can expect from your own social efforts, giving you a goal to meet or exceed.
However, make sure that what they are doing is actually working before you emulate it by checking out the social media profile of some eCommerce businesses that you know to be successful first.
Give Social Media Followers the Exclusive
If you want your social media followers to find value in following you, then provide them with exclusive offers and promotions that they can’t get anywhere else. You can either choose to do this for one particular social media site or promote the offer across all of your social media platforms.
Whichever method you choose, make sure that you are advertising that exclusivity somewhere to entice other customers to follow you in the hope of future promotions or offers.
For example, if you are only offering the promotion on Twitter, use other social websites to get customers who aren’t yet following you on Twitter to do so, or if you are using all of the networks, advertise the exclusive offer on your main website or in your store.
Use Visual Tools to Enhance Social Media
The visual medium is the most effective one, and you can take advantage of the ease in which your message can be passed on by using photo social networks like Instagram and Pinterest or by adding visual enhancements to your other social networks. Photo social mediums are perfect for eCommerce websites especially, but any brand can make the medium work with a little creativity.
Always be Improving
Like anything else, social media success takes practice.
One of the things that many business owners don’t take advantage of is the array of tools that are out there for measuring social media. Just about every metric you could think of is available with the tools that are currently available and this information will help you decide all kinds of things like what kind of content you should use to get people to engage with you, and which of your products get the best response.
You can use the data that you collect to improve your social media efforts and double or even triple your results.
Limit Your Social Networks
Don’t just throw up a profile on every social network website you can find. There are thousands of them and most of them will not get you results that make it worth your time to keep them updated. Choose social networks that make the most sense for your particular type of business. Facebook, Twitter and Google + are the big ones, but if you want to use visual media you also should consider either Instagram or Pinterest.