Social media these days is one of the primary ways to interact with friends and family on internet. However, almost all social media channels also double up as venues for facilitating E Commerce activities. Social media websites can be utilized for brand awareness, launching new products, creating sales funnel among many other things.
Social media can also be used as customer communication channels where complaints and inquiries can be handled right on the social media website.
Social media can also to be used to develop granular insight into the customer behaviour so that you know your customer base and you can move to end of funnel pretty quickly (in this case, sales)
Your E Commerce store can benefit from being on social media and utilizing the benefits of a targeted campaigns run on social media with deep analysis done on your customer segment.
Select your social media platform carefully
The idea is not to start on all social media platforms at once and then get overwhelmed checking up the engagement on each of them.
If you are a sole entrepreneur or a business owner with small marketing team, trying to be on every social media platform at once meaning stretching your limited resources.
Let us say your product needs an explainer or a live tutorial (like a how-to-use video). Video would be obvious choice for marketing. And the platform that serves the best interest is YouTube. YouTube viewers are used to long videos and they will not mind watching a well-made video.
However, if your product appeals to families or friends who interact a lot with each other, you may prefer Facebook as that kind of engagement gets higher reward over there.
If you prefer short form videos, Instagram and Tik Tok are your friends and if images are what are important to you, Pinterest is the right place.
If virality is important to you and your product line needs rapid coverage, X will better serve your needs.
Influencer marketing
Social media created a new generation of celebrities. They are called as influencers. Even though the term does not have a lot of positives associated with it, influencers are a major force in the social media world.
A reliable influencer can readily convince their follower to give your products a try. They can become brand awareness consultants for your brand, taking your new product launches to their million of followers.
This obviously introduces a level of scale that is not possible with just plain advertising.
However, you need to be aware if the influencer has the right reach and credentials to connect with the followers. And, that influencer needs to be knowledgeable about the industry he is going to work with.
Understand how interactions work in social media context
Social media interactions are different compared to other styles of interactions. In a phone or email conversation, a limited number of people are involved and there is almost no virality.
However, with social media, every statement that your company writes, is broadcast to the world. The statements may generate further discussions which may be positive or negative.
The primary idea on social media is to show that your brand is mature enough to handle all kinds of feedback such as praise, criticism or worse, trolling. Respectful answering in the face of provocation, with facts indicates that you can handle criticism of your product and are willing to incorporate changes to make your product a better one.
Using nonorganic methods to promote your products
Yes, we all want almost zero cost virality. In recent years, the organic reach of the pages esp. in Facebook has been going down continuously. That means social media companies would want to cut the free traffic and charge you for showing your products and campaigns to their users.
With the paid advertising, there are a number of features that social media platforms provide. You can for example with paid advertising, target a specific set of people, you want to reach. It could location, gender or interest groups. This may not be possible in a organic sharing. The reach may be far restricted than the paid campaign
Use Social media as customer service
How and why, you may ask!!
Using social media platforms as customer service is a great and effective way to achieve good results and reputation across websites that already have huge numbers of engaged viewers. Social media platforms are the places where trends emerge and ideas happen. With you working in the right direction, you can leverage social media to answer questions, handle comments and also listen to complaints. Your thoughtful responses will lead to better benefits for your business
