The rise of social media and the huge number of audience members with diverse interests across these platforms has made a huge impact on how brands approach marketing. Most brands in the market, big and small, are utilizing these platforms to increase brand awareness and attract more customers.
The best part about social media is, unlike traditional marketing, you don’t have to spend a ton of money on advertising here. So, a small business can also reach lots of potential buyers without spending much, and if you have an eCommerce business it can seriously help you to boost, even double your eCommerce sales.
In this post, I will walk you through some of the most effective social media optimization ideas that will surely help your business grow on social media.
1. Share follower-generated testimonials
Testimonials have played a major role in closing sales since the dawn of sales, and they are playing an even bigger role today. As such, you should be getting testimonials from your happy customers and publishing them on your website. Or even taking it a step further and creating video testimonials for publishing on YouTube. You can then post these testimonials on social media to help increase the reach.
Buzzsumo is one of the greatest tools out there online, and they proudly display the logos of major brands that are using the company’s platform. You can see what they display on their home page in the screenshot below:
Lots of companies follow BuzzSumo’s lead and brag about who is loyal to them and uses their products and services. This can go a long way in building trust with your target audience.
It’s common psychology, social proof, as they say. When you see someone else using a product and sharing good reviews about it, you are more likely to buy it than you would have been if you saw no one vouching for it.
So, always take advantage of social media marketing to display your customers’ happy feedback. If you have a customer who has used your product and shared reviews about it online, reach out to them and see if they’d be willing to record a testimonial.
Then share that testimonial across your social media channels in the hopes that your followers will see someone in their peer group who’s happy with it and decide to use your products themselves.
2. Make your social media page interactive
People come to social media for entertainment and information, not to see tons of promotional material from your brand.
Your followers have the power to unfollow you at any point in time if they don’t like your content.
So, make sure to have entertaining content along with informational content that truly adds value to your followers’ lives. If you always talk about your products and don’t show that you care about your audience, they won’t stick with you.
So find creative ways to keep your audience engaged.
Here are some useful tips to help you more effectively engage with your audience members.
Going live:
Going live is one of the best ways to connect with your community, because when you are live you are showing them your real face and talking to your community one on one.
This helps build trust in your audience’s eyes.
They ask you questions directly if they have any doubts about your product and how it works, so it is a very interactive process that can help you in many ways.
Create memes:
Creating Memes around your brand can help you get a lot of eyeballs. And they also have the added bonus of keeping your audience entertained.
Keep an eye on the trending memes and try to make one for your brand too and get it shared all over. A great meme can go viral quickly, as people will be inclined to share it with their friends to boost their social status.
Barkbox is a brand that does a great example of creating and promoting memes to drive engagement on social media.
Run contests:
Running contests is always a good idea. When you’re doing a giveaway, people are likely to engage in hopes that they may win and receive whatever price you’re giving away.
You can ask your audience to tag 2-3 friends. Then those people will also jump in and share the content in the hopes they might just win the contest.
In this way, you get a lot of exposure and engagement.
So, starting running contests to drive more engagement and add more followers to your pages.
Give a glimpse in stories and ask to follow the link:
If you have a new product in your store or you have written a new article about your business, you can utilize a channel like Instagram and it’s Stories feature to give a sneak peek. This encourages people to stop by your site to learn more.
Share the most important part of the piece in the stories, as this will make your audience want to learn more about it.
And then you can share the link to the full piece of content with your followers via the link in your profile. Make sure to share a few glimpses of your content via multiple posts to increase the sense of curiosity in your audience’s mind. Then ask them to read the article or see the actual product by clicking the link.
This is similar to how teasers and trailers for new film releases work. They serve to generate interest and create a sense of curiosity. Use this knowledge to your advantage.
AgoraPulse:
AgoraPulse is a great tool when it comes to managing your social media platforms from one single place.
Be it your Instagram page, Facebook page, Twitter handle, or Youtube channel, this social media tool can handle all your social media needs.
Agorapulse helps in scheduling your posts and engage with your audience. A tool like this makes it easy for your team since they are able to work and collaborate from one single platform.
3. Let your audience know about your company culture
I cannot put more emphasis on this, people buy emotions rather than products these days.
So, how do you give them that personal, connected feeling through your social media channels?
You can share content that gives them an insider view into your organization. This builds a connection between your company and your customers. They feel connected with your brand.
Here are a few types of connect you can share to create personal connections with your business.
- Team member highlights
- Videos of production of your products
- Photos from team events
- Videos with messages from your leadership
Find creative ways to bring your audience behind the scenes and provide a look into what goes on there.
Your audience will develop a deeper, lasting connection with your business, which leads to continued business.
4. Emojis play a major role
It was found in a recent HubSpot study that Emojis can increase click-through rate. This is an important concept to grasp as you craft your content.
Emojis in your email headers and social media posts can make your message stand out from all the plain text messages surrounding it.
5. Varying content types is important
Don’t stick with only one type of content.
There are really 4 main types of content (with tons of sub-types that can be broken down). The four we consider to be the main types are:
- Video
- Audio
- Text
- Infographics/Images
Make use of all four of these content types, as your followers will get bored with just text or if you are always just posting images.
Dig into your analytics and determine which one is liked most by your audience. And which performs best across different platforms. Then work in more of that type of content, but don’t forget to continue to vary the types.
Every platform has its own specialty, and people come to these platforms with different mindsets. So, make sure you are leveraging each platform according to the type of content that is most preferred by its users.
Youtube is only for video content, but you can and should publish an optimized text description with each piece so it stands better chance of showing up in search. You can vary your video types between long and short form depending on the type of video content.
On Instagram, people are most likely to watch short videos and consume photo content, so try to stick with that. You’ll want to add a description, of course, but the main focus should be on creating short, easy to consume visual content.
On Facebook, people are now more tilted towards videos, so video content can be a great choice for that platform. But this is not a hard and fast rule. Text plays well on Facebook as well, but you’ll want to add some level of visual content to accompany any text you place.
You must use every content on different platforms and analyze which one is being liked the most.
Infographics are another appealing form of content which are highly shareable. These work well on channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram (smaller ones anyway), and Pinterest.
6. Using live elements of social media
It is very important to create a relationship with your customers to make them feel an important part of your brand. This helps build critically important trust.
Going live on channels like Instagram or Facebook helps a lot in establishing a connection with your audience.
You can have a fun time with them and solve their queries about your products or business, live and in person (digital person anyway).
You can promote upcoming conversations that focus on trending topics. You’ll get people showing up to listen, and then as the conversation goes on, your audience will grow. And depending upon what channel you are using, you can record the conversation and share it later (some you cannot record).
7. Create blog content based on audience trends
Create blog articles around topics related to your products. Provide educational insights and actionable advice to your audience to help them grow and solve problems. Within these posts, you can add links to your products and services as they relate to the topic.
Then share these articles on your social media channels. This can give a serious boost to your traffic from social.
If you are struggling to uncover the most trending topics that would connect with your audience, there’s a great tool you can use – Buzzsumo.
Buzzsumo is a tool where you can search for relevant keywords on which you generate topics.
Using this tool, you can see which articles are being shared the most and then review those articles and create content that takes the topic to the next level.
Analyze the popular articles and see what tactics are used, the flow of content, the images are used, and look at all the elements that make them popular.
This tool is very helpful and is also used by the marketing experts like Neil Patel and Brian Dean.
All you have to do is sign up for Buzzsumo and put in the keywords which you want to search for.
In this case, I just typed “How to start a blog” in the search box and then hit on “Go”.
And this is what I got.
Beside the blog articles listed, you can see the tool highlights the engagements on each post. This gives you an idea of what headlines worked the best and which ones are the most popular. It also shows you the the number of backlinks they have managed to earn.
So, Buzzsumo is a great tool to analyze what type of content is most popular and from which platform most of the engagement is coming. This can give you tons of valuable insights to craft the best content you can and get it shared more on social media.
8. Third-Party Involvement
It is a great move to share other major brands’ content on your page. Doing this serves two purposes:
- You can gain access to the followers of that other brand.
- You can effectively increase the reach of your post if you get the brand’s attention and they share your content.
You can also run contests in collaboration with other brands where they will run a contest that will be sponsored by you, or vice versa. During these contests, the managers of the other brand’s social media channels will ask people to follow or like your page.
Tagging influential accounts who use your product will always encourage other people to buy your products. So, make sure you mention brands and influencers in your posts to increase the reach.
9. Create an open line of communication
When people buy something from you, they are likely to have questions.
- What if the product which I ordered is not the one I get?
- What if the product broke down?
- How do a create a return?
- Where do I get more add-ons for this product?
- What material is this made from?
- How do I fix this?
The list goes on… There can be a million questions in a buyer’s mind.
So in order to help them feel comfortable and to continue to build that trust we keep mentioning, always have a line of communication open. It can be email, chat or another format. Just make sure you have something available, and be responsive.
This will give your customers a sense of security and encourage them to buy from you again and again.
10. Social media takeover
This trick is one of the newest and less used tricks. It can always be risky, so you need to make sure you thoroughly vet anyone who takes over your accounts.
This is where you let someone take over and post on your social media accounts for a period of time. It can be a user of your product showing a day in their life and how the product impacts that day, or it can be a famous person or influencer to boost the popularity.
Suppose you have a fitness brand and “The Rock” takes over your social handles. Before doing so he posts about it on his own social media handles. His followers will instantly flock to your channels to follow and see what he has to say.
So lots of traffic from his handle will come you way, and you will get a lot of exposure in the process.
Conclusion:
If you’re looking to really get the most out of your social media profiles, make sure to follow the tips laid out here. If you do, you’ll not only increase engagement and exposure, but you will also increase your revenue through building lasting relationships with your customers.
Just remember one thing: keep your customers entertained and solve their queries through your posts. This will make them feel important, and they will keep on buying from you.
Social media is such a powerful tool. Don’t miss out on that power by failing to leverage these optimization techniques.
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Discount & giveaway campaigns can be a very effective e-Commerce social media marketing strategy. I love the way you provide info in this article and audience who will come to read or finding such information may also like it.
Thanks, Aaron. You’re 100% correct. Discount codes and giveaways are great tools for growing your eCommerce business. They also help you collect leads and build your email lists so you can target customers later on with specific messages and customized product recommendations.