E-Commerce Seller Financing   •   November 03, 2021

Social Media Can Help You Expand Markets and Boost Sales — Here Is How to Do It Right

Social media is quickly becoming the place where people shop. If you don’t spend much time on sites like Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, this might come as a surprise. Still, with 72% of all adults in the U.S. using social media, and more than 3.6 billion on social media globally, this is a marketing and sales opportunity you can’t afford to pass up.

Social Media Marketing for eCommerce: Start With a Strategy

Two recent numbers put a spotlight on the need for you to sell socially. Hootsuite found that 81% of Instagram users use the app to research products and services. And Yotpo reports that 61% of all direct-to-consumer brands say that social media is their top acquisition channel.

You can do many things with your eCommerce social media strategy. To boost sales, you will want to build brand loyalty, increase organic traffic, and drive sales. To do this, you will want to use a combination of paid social posts and organic social posts. Let’s look at those in more detail.

Organic eCommerce Social Media Strategies

“Organic” is a very buzzy word these days, but what does it really mean? Just like the veggies in your garden, an “organic” social strategy grows on its own, using your strategic content and which you do not spend money to develop.

An organic eCommerce social media strategy drives traffic to your business naturally and over time. It can include posts, stories, links, shares, and tags. The more organic traffic you can generate, the more natural growth your sales will see. Here are some tips:

• Please get to know hashtags and use them properly. Hashtags are how most social media sites find and recommend content to users.
• Post product reviews: Have an in-house or affiliate reviewer? See a review elsewhere? Get those links and post them! Nearly 90% of all buying decisions come from what people read online.
• Your customers post the best content because it shows your products in the real world — regularly search for @mentions and share them on your site.

Paid eCommerce Social Media Strategies

Every social media platform has a way for you to buy ads on it — this is what is known as paid media advertising. Moreover, along with organic social media strategies, paid social media can help you extend your reach in targeted, specific ways that organic may fall short on. Plus, there are many options to choose from, including retargeting ads, shoppable posts, and more.

Paid advertising, also called paid PPC, works on audience targeting and personalization, and this is where a media strategy partner can work wonders to help you target a specific audience, behavior, or location. Targeting options can include:

• Age
• Sex
• Location
• Income
• Interests
• Language

On sites like Facebook, you can create custom audiences based on people who have interacted with a brand previously — yours or someone else’s — or who closely resemble existing customers.

Social media has extraordinary power to grow the eCommerce business. For reaching a large number of particular people in a hurry, your eCommerce business can’t afford to ignore it.