Any person who owns an e-commerce store will tell you that Social Media plays a critical role in shaping online shopping. Close to 74 percent of consumers are turning to social media to guide their purchase decisions. 90 percent of these clients’ state that they trust the recommendations that their peers give on various products. Any e-commerce store that does not integrate social media in their marketing strategy cannot compete favorably in the modern business environment. Here are some tips on how to use social media for e-commerce marketing.

Understand the Content Your Customers Require

You need to post content that will meet the needs of your prospects and customers. You can get meaningful insights by asking your target audience what they would like to learn about and monitor the kind of interactions that your clients have on social media.

Sharing Instead of Selling

Most customers make their purchase decision on social media but they don’t visit these sites with the intention of shopping. The beginning point of social media marketing is to build relationships and selling comes afterwards. Therefore, you need to pay more attention on sharing useful information and building trust before you can attempt to make a sale. Most decision makers in the B2B sales interact with approximately five pieces of content before they get ready to talk to a sales representative. This principle is also applicable to the B2C ecommerce marketing.

Publish the Right Content

The underlying factor in this case is to share the right content. One of the things that can make potential clients to shy away from your products are sales peaches. The information you share should be worthwhile and add value to your customers and prospects. The experience should remain contextual, interactive, and social and use the social media posts to tell customers stories, provide helpful tips and share news. Have a good balance between promotional posts and those that are entertaining, informative and educative. The needs of your clients should be above your personal interests.

Optimize Your Social Media Posts

The best way to increase the visibility of your posts is to use high conversational keywords. This will help you to reach out to a larger audience apart from your direct followers. The recommended approach is to do a keyword search so as to find out the phrases your consumers are searching online. Publish relevant content that is related to your industry, business, products or services and then incorporate they key words and phrases in your posts in a strategic manner. You could also add some visual elements in those posts to grab the attention of your scanning and busy readers.

Interact with Your Followers

The best place to interact with your customers and prospects is on social media. Monitor all posts and engage with your followers on a daily basis as you allow them to ask questions and share their experiences. Engaging with your followers will allow you to make sure that you are meeting their needs. The best way to interact with your followers include joining groups, establishing relationships with influencers, and hosting live chats. You need to be consistent in all these efforts for you to achieve success.

Recommending reading: How Do You Get Twitter Followers For Free?

Data Leveraging

You can gather a lot of information about customer behavior from the analytics of your website. You will be able to understand where a huge chunk of your social media traffic comes from, the type of content that attracts most views, and the most appropriate timing that your visitors engage with the content. It is wise to review the historic performance of your content before you put a new strategy in place. This will assist you to identify what was most effective and combine those tactics with new initiatives going forward. You cannot discover the best industry practices unless you learn to leverage on the date you have.

Use Your Reviews

You can share the reviews from your satisfied customers as they can boost your social media marketing efforts. Reviews are very powerful social media marketing tools because most prospects like to open to a new product when it is coming from a third party. The approach is more effective when it is coming from a loyal customer. Recent survey reveals that 88% of consumers trust online reviews just like personal recommendations because they are very objective.

Tracking of Progress

You need to determine how you will track changing customer behavior and progress while developing your social media strategy. You may be required to revise your plan, create reports, and update your team members on the progress each month. Trends keep on changing and an effective social media marketing strategy has to be accountable for each of them.

Add Social Sharing Buttons in Some Strategic Places

Each product page should have sharing widgets such as the ‘likes’ button. The prominent areas of your website should also have the sharing button. This will allow customers to share their reviews with their followers on other social media platforms. They can also share a sales conformation email or offer with their friends. Such buttons play a critical role of turning your satisfied clients into evangelists of your products and services.

Use Paid Advertising

You can take your social media marketing to the next level by using paid advertisement such as promoted tweets, LinkedIn adds, and Facebook ads among other sponsored efforts. These promoted tweets should link the customer back to the product page to initiate a conversation. These paid options can drastically help you to boost the traffic of your website as long as you target them highly.

Be Precise and Sweet

Compelling and precise update will attract more following on social media in comparison to posts that are very long. This will help you to organize your content, promote interaction, and expand the reach for your posts. There is no need to use too many hashtags in a single social media post. It is good to limit them to a maximum of two in each update.

Use Visual Content

Text-based content is naturally less engaging than image-based content. This makes it an ideal choice for marketing your content on social media sites. According to research, the best way to optimize your social media content is to use images. The images should be relevant and sharable on other social media platforms.

Let Your Blogs Have Tweetable Quotes

You can add the ‘tweet this’ functionality to your blog apart from allowing readers to tween the whole blog. Make sure you have tweetable phrases and quotes throughout the blog. You can make this process easy and fast by using tools like Clickto Tweet.

Establish a Blog

The blog will make sure that you have a stream of new content on your website. Customers don’t want to read what is obvious or has been on the site for an extended period. The blog should be active and possess inspirational and educative content so as to give the clients something to talk about. It should showcase the unique expertise or perspective of your brand. You can use a single blog to generate a long list of posts that will engage your followers and motivate them to read throughout the website.

Recommended reading:

• Top 10 Social Media Analytics Tools for Marketers
• 7 Tips on Social Media Marketing for Small Business
• 10 Advantages of Social Media Advertising for Your Business