Effective Social Media Marketing

Since most online users are active on some social platform, marketing on social media can help you listen to, and engage with customers. Although posting regularly on social platforms is a good start, it is important to nail down a marketing strategy to go where your customers are, and begin interacting with them.

4 in 10 social media users have purchased an item after sharing or favoriting it.

Social media is increasingly becoming a way for people to share things that are important to them with their friends and followers. In the context of your eCommerce stores, this means that even though customers may not be leaving a review for your products on your site, they may be doing it on their social platforms. You can help make this sharing easier, and ensure that up-to-date content that you want about your products is being shared by building a strategy for your store.

We’ve already talked about improving social commerce with the goal of selling better via social media. However, in this post, we’ll look at a few simple ways you can improve your social media marketing to help you connect with customers and build a community, and some plugins you can use to do so.

The first step in engaging customers on social platforms is to understand which platform you want to target to get the most return on your effort. Depending on your goals, “return” can mean many things, including sales, interactions, shares, additional likes, etc.

Amongst the big social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest – Pinterest is the one that is most likely to drive purchases, according to a Vision Critical study. This means that users on Pinterest are generally looking for recommendations for purchases. Assuming your products photograph well, try putting your products on Pinterest using the different types of pins.

It is also important to see which platform your target audience is most active on. For example, according to the Vision Critical study, 83% of users on Pinterest are female, whereas they are more evenly split between males and females on Facebook and Twitter.

Another tid bit is that the most followed topic on Pinterest is cooking and dining, whereas it is health information on both Facebook and Twitter.

You can also learn more about demographics on different social platforms from Sprout Social.

One way for customers to inform others of their interests or purchases is by sharing with their friends and followers. You can make it easier for them to share your products and pages by including share buttons for different social networks. When they share your product or page, the link can drive more traffic to your site.

In addition, if customers rave about your product or their experience with your brand, this can help create word-of-mouth referrals. A regular part of making a purchase these days is to see what other customers have to say about a product or brand. By including social buttons on your pages, you can make sure people land on the pages you want them to.

According to an Ipsos survey, 71% of global internet users share on social media.

Use the Social Sharing Buttons or EDD Social Links extensions for Easy Digital Downloads to include sharing buttons on product pages. For WooCommerce, you can use the WooCommerce Social Buttons PRO plugin to make it easy for users to share content from your store. If you use the Storefront theme, the free Product sharing plugin is another option.

We’ve also got some other sharing button recommendations here.

According to the Ipsos survey, the most popular item to share on social media are images. In addition, images can increase leads by 55% on Twitter.

Rich content like images, infographics, memes, etc. capture users’ attention more quickly, and can summarize an idea in a succinct way.

You can use something like Buffer to schedule multiple posts and for different social profiles. This can help reduce the time you spend posting on different profiles, and allow you to focus on running your store.

Plugins like WPSSO will also help you by optimizing sharing images for different platforms (among other sharing data).

Instead of users creating an account for your store, you can give them the option to log in to your store by connecting to it with one of their social profiles. This can create a better experience as customers don’t have to remember or create an additional user profile.

You can track which social platform users sign up with and focus your marketing efforts for that platform.

You can let users login via their social profiles through the Social Login extension for Easy Digital Downloads, and through the WooCommerce Social Login for your WooCommerce store.

Take a look at the demo for the WooCommerce Social Login extension to see the user experience for social logins.

There are many different places customers share things related to your products. You can help curate and highlight this content in different ways. On different platforms, you can repost things your customers share and upload to showcase different ways your customers use your products. You can also curate customer content and create blog posts.

Make sure to point out what your official social profiles are and which hashtags customers should use. This will not only make it easier for you to find your customers’ posts, but also help make the hashtag popular as more people will use them consistently.

One of the best type of content you can share on your store are photos of customers using your products. For example, you can let customers know that your store features Instagram photos shared with a specific hashtag.

Use the WooCommerce Instagram extension to include user-created Instagram photos for each product. Once you assign a hashtag for each product, a feed of images with that hashtag appears on that product’s page.

You can also use the Yoast WooCommerce SEO extension to create rich pins for Pinterest, and product cards for Twitter.

As an example, Harvey’s furniture increased their clickthrough rate by 3 times after they implemented Twitter product cards.

If you’re looking for another option to optimize product cards, WPSSO is great for this, and the Pro version lets you optimize sharing for several networks.

You can use the WooCommerce Facebook Tab extension as well, which creates a tab on a Facebook page where your products are displayed. Customers can quickly view information about these products, and are redirected to your store to finish the purchase.

Even though emails are one of the highest converting sales channels, you can use social media marketing to reach more people and build a community for your brand. Even though social purchasing isn’t as big as email right now, it is steadily growing with the option to purchase directly on social platforms.

You can prepare your eCommerce store to effectively use social marketing through these simple tips. This starts with knowing the platform you want to market on, embedding share buttons on your store, sharing rich content on your social profiles, allowing customers to login through their social profiles, letting customers share their content on your store, and creating product cards.

Are there other social marketing ideas that you have used? How did they affect your store? Tell us in the comments.

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