Social media can be difficult for any business to perfect, but it seems especially tricky for ecommerce businesses.
Local businesses have a little leg up on things because they are really part of their community. They can post content related to their business, but also related to the community and that lends itself well to social media.
B2Bs have a little tougher, but they don’t need to make as many connections to get great return on their social efforts.
Ecommerce companies typically have low prices per item and need a large number of customers to succeed. That means that for social media marketing to work an ecommerce company needs a lot of followers along with a lot of engagement.
Here are some tips for getting your social media marketing to work if you’re an ecommerce company.
1. Gotta Post More Often
Most social media users access their social network of choice once per day. The influencers and heavy users are accessing their social networks multiple times per day.
And on some social networks, like Facebook, the businesses and brands don’t get priority in the news feed.
As a result, businesses and brands need to post more often if they want to be noticed by their followers and by potential followers. Your followers likely are following others brands and you know they’re following their family and friends. It’s challenging for a business to get one update each day to get noticed.
Some of the most successful brands on social media are posting multiple times per day. Wayfair is an example of a big brand that usually posts more than once per day on Facebook. There are others that seem to use one update each day as the bare minimum and others use two or three updates per day as the minimum.
And one final good thing about posting more often is that you learn faster what updates work and don’t work. That leads to better posting.
2. User Generated Content
This could also be called engagement. I wasn’t sure how exactly to word this one.
You can obviously get more out of your social media efforts if you get users to engage more on your page or profile. The more they engage the more active your profile looks and the more people that aren’t your followers will see activity on your profile.
Something that I see ecommerce brands doing really well on social media is asking questions. Here’s a recent question that Etsy asked its followers on Facebook. Here is another one that Bowhunting.com asked.
Asking questions is a great way to get your followers involved. Not every question will get answered, but the more you ask the more you’ll learn what your followers like to engage with.
3. Website Content
If you’re struggling to post more often a little trick you can use is to repost content that is from your website.
Ecommerce companies are now using all kinds of content in their marketing strategies. They’re creating videos, blog posts, guides, podcasts, white papers, studies and more.
All of those content items are usually published on the ecommerce company’s website, but the smart companies are also taking snippets from those content pieces and posting them on social media.
Use all the content you’re creating to supplement or entirely drive your social content. For example, I could take this post and repost one of the tips from the list of five on social media. This one post will give me five social media posts.
And you can use other content on your site too like customer reviews, customer stories, product descriptions and more.
4. Visuals With Every Post
The more you look at social media today the more you realize that using visuals is not really an option. Just looking at the feeds of Wayfair, Etsy and Bowhunting.com you’ll see that they use visuals in about 99% of their posts.
There’s not much more to say on the subject.
It helps to have a professional photographer on the team. You can also ask your followers to share photos. That will help make your feed more visual. You can do the same with videos.
Bowhunting.com does a great job on their feed with getting followers to share photos. Their feed really stands out with all the visuals.
5. Featured Stories
I saw one of these on Etsy’s feed on Facebook and I thought it was a good idea.
It’s a featured story from one of their sellers.
They simply linked to the story that was originally published on their blog or on a different section on their website. Bowhunting.com does this well too. Here is a featured story of sorts where they show a photo with a caption and a few sentences and it really tells a story of two of their pro staffers.
The takeaway here is that people like reading stories. They could be stories about employees, team members, products, customers and partners.
You can publish the full story on your website and share snippets on social media. Or you could publish the entire story on Facebook. And commit to doing it regularly. Maybe once a month or maybe once a week.
Conclusion
Social media takes effort. Most businesses have learned that lesson. You’re not going to succeed if you give it a half effort. And things especially won’t work out if you give half effort as an ecommerce company. That requires even more effort. Hopefully, though, the tips above will help you take your ecommerce social media to a new level. Just look at what the successful social media users are doing and follow their lead and do a little innovating of your own and you’ll be fine.