The Social Media Guide to Driving Traffic to Your eCommerce Store

Whether you are an online seller, entrepreneur or marketer, social media plays an important role in marketing strategy. It helps you find the right target audience, build your community, drive traffic, engage with customers, promote your products, and more.

So, if you are running an eCommerce business and still are not using social media, you are missing a great and profitable opportunity for your business. Here’s a quick look at some social media tips to increase traffic and grow your eCommerce business.

1. Post Consistently on Social Media:

It is important to post content regularly on your social media profiles when it comes to getting more traffic and increasing customer engagement with your eCommerce website. The key to successful social media marketing is consistently posting on several social media networks. Check out the general posting frequencies below for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Posting on Facebook twice a day receives 57% likes and 78% of comments per post. As more posts are made throughout the day, those numbers drop. Therefore, the recommendation is to only post on Facebook once each day.
• With respect to Twitter, Socialbakers found that three tweets per day received the highest level of engagement. Identifying the most advantageous posting time for your business is also important.
• For LinkedIn, the ideal posting frequency is once per day during the week, which allows you to reach 60% of your audience. Weekends are not an ideal time to post on LinkedIn because of the professional nature of the site.

As you can see, social media success requires consistent postings, and the biggest challenges to posting are time and frequency. For example, if you want to promote your products on social media, you need to copy your product images and content to share on Facebook, and then you have to repeat this activity for all of the other social networks like Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and more.

This process is time-consuming for your business and occurs during business hours when you could utilize this time for other sales-relevant activities.

Though social media sharing is important, using social media scheduling and automation tools is highly advisable. Below, I have summarized some of the best marketing tools. Take a look.

a. Mento.io

Mento is one of the best and handiest tools for eCommerce store owners. It provides advanced scheduling options and allows you to integrate your eCommerce store so that your product promotion is much easier. Connecting your eCommerce store eliminates the need for manually copying your images and content, which is a super time-saver.

Mento has taken it a step further by offering a pre-generated tweet and a post update based on your product description and category. In less than 30 minutes, you can easily schedule product promotions for an entire month.

b. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another popular social media management tool that allows you to manage multiple social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and more. Hootsuite makes it easy to work across multiple social media networks. It offers free, pro and enterprise solutions for managing unlimited social profiles, enhanced analytics, advanced scheduling, etc.

c. Onlywire

Onlywire is a security automation tool to submit content to social media networks. It allows you to simultaneously submit online content to over 50 popular social media networks. It supports many social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Whether you are an individual blogger, a marketing manager or a social media professional, it makes it easy to auto-submit your content to all popular social media communities.

2. Share Unique Content:

Sales pitches turn away customers. Instead, share interesting and useful content that adds value; don’t do it every time you post because that will reduce interest. Your customers love to follow you when they get interesting things from you, so don’t hesitate to share your experiences, news and helpful tips.

Below, you can see that Flipkart has used a trending hashtag and a current affairs post to engage with the customers of their store. They don’t always discuss products but share interesting and engaging content with their followers.

Whenever you decide on your social media strategy, share your posts on each platform. You can plan your social media sharing strategy using one blog post, one inspirational quote and one promotional post. With this strategy, you can educate, inform and entertain your customer.

In addition, sharing things like customer testimonials can also create platforms for potential clients to engage with one another positively. This is a good way to effectively build customer engagement.

3. Use Your Reviews:

Allow your satisfied customers to do your social media marketing for you by sharing their reviews of your products. It is great because customers are more likely to be open to a product review when it comes from an objective third-party, such as a loyal customer who has already used the product.

These reviews are authentic and build trust among your loyal customers. 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision.  Online reviews are necessary for eCommerce sites. User reviews are reliable and drive sales. They are also something that most potential customers will check out before deciding to purchase.

4. Use Visual Content Effectively:

Visual content creates 40% more engagement on social media than average text-based posts. If you want to stand out, sharing high-quality and appealing images in your social posts is more important than ever. If you want to come up with fresh images for each social media post, you can create tools like Canva and BeFunky will help you a lot.

Using these marketing tools, you can create free website images, social media posts, blogs, and more. Sharing product images and the latest offers on social media drives more engagement than just sharing a simple text post. You can also make your images shareable on sites that favor image-driven marketing, like Instagram and Pinterest (don’t forget to include the pin it button on all images).

5. Interact With Followers:

Social media is a great platform for creating a customer network.  Check posts and engage with customers daily to ask questions, reply to their comments, show your appreciation or thank them for sharing your content and participate in discussions.

It shows that you really care about them and are interested in fulfilling their requirements. When it comes to an online business, social media can help you get more followers to your social media page by doing the following:

6. Participate In Groups:

There are many industry-appropriate eCommerce groups on LinkedIn and Facebook that you can join. For example, eCommerce Merchant, Magento enterprise professionals, eCommerce Experience and many more are focused on helping online retailers grow their online businesses.

However, joining groups is also a great way to monitor keywords, hashtags and conversation topics. You can search through posts and share, retweet or repost articles, photos, videos and other appealing content that can provide more engagement and attract more customers. In this way, you can create strong relationships with online customers.

a. Start Live Chats:

Live chats are great for real-time conversations about industry topics and trending news. It also allows connecting with interested visitors as they make buying decisions. You can start a Twitter chat to communicate and reply to their questions.

The clothing brand, Patagonia, is a great example of a business that does this well. As an outdoor brand, their customers are environmentally-conscious and interested in travel and the outdoors. They frequently host live chats on environmental issues and include environmental causes and travel content in their posts.

In this way, they engage with their customers and know what their customers want to see without needing to be overtly promotional around their own products. If you want to track their reach and effectiveness, create hashtags for live chats.

Further, you can integrate social media conversions with live chat tools like Tagove, Zopim or Intercom to gather more information and interact with users in real-time.

b. Build Relationships With Influencers:

People who have a strong online following can provide a huge boost to a brand’s reach and its trust factor. You must engage on their page if you want to build a relationship with an influencer.

You can ask for their opinion, mention when you’ve cited or referenced them, share their content, comment on their blog posts, etc. These are all great ways to build relationships with influencers.

7. Add a Social Sharing Button in the Proper Place:

Using a social sharing button is one of the best ways to get more traffic to your website. You must add social sharing widgets, like Facebook’s “Like” button, to all your product pages. This can be an effective way to direct customers toward buying your products.

Additionally, you must consider the placement of the sharing buttons in your website’s design. For example, allowing customers to share their product reviews with their Twitter followers or Facebook friends. You can also allow them to share a sales offer or even a sales confirmation email.

8. Use Hashtags Properly:

Hashtags are a great way to increase the exposure of your content. In addition, by using hashtags, your content gets discovered more easily on social media platforms. It not only helps to organize the content and expand the reach of your posts, but it also promotes interaction.

Ensure you are not using too many hashtags in one social media post.  You should limit them to one or two per post.

Posts with hashtags can be seen by everyone, which allows your posts to reach an audience beyond your followers. In order to get the highest level of engagement and traffic, you’ll need to find the proper hashtag. For example, for a digital marketer, the hashtag #marketingtips will reach a more targeted audience and get more followers than simply using the hashtag #socialmedia.

9. Keep Your Updates Short:

Whenever posting content on social media, try to keep your updates short because it’s been determined that shorter updates tend to perform better in terms of engagement and views. Keep that in mind when you’re making an update. Short posts with a question mark at the end had a 15% higher engagement.

In addition, keeping your posts below 250 characters can get you 60% more engagement than you might otherwise see. You can get up to 66% more engagement if you keep your posts under 80 characters.

Short updates look interesting, and your followers can read them easily. Make your posts in one sentence and under the 140 Twitter character count. Nowadays, most users use social media via mobile devices, so post short updates with eye-catching and interesting headlines.

In closing:

Incorporating social media into your marketing strategy is important to be competitive in eCommerce. Applying proper strategies and social media marketing tips can increase brand awareness, drive more traffic and conversions, boost engagement and loyalty and ultimately grow your business. If you find the above information useful, please share your views in the comment box below.

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