Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 According to Oberlo, there are 3.5 billion social media active users around the world. This equalizes to 47% of the world’s population. The grandness of social media users has made Social media a key source for E-commerce websites to drive traffic. Social media has been crowned as the central player for driving sales to E-commerce websites. Social media brings an abundance of fresh opportunities to gain visitors and increase conversion rates. In spite of the gains of social media, E-commerce merchants require an effective marketing strategy to get maximum output from the efforts put on. Image Source: BroadbandSearch Reviewing the above statistics, it would be dishonor not to implement social media strategies for your E-commerce store. Social media is a challenging place where you are easily skipped and ignored by anyone. In the world of user preferences, identify what users want to see? What are their interests? How can you increase the awareness of your social media channels? How to grab user’s attention and land them right on your website? Every social media platform serves a different approach having a diverse fan base. Choosing the right platform based on your business needs help to win in a long way. Let’s see how social platforms differ from each other. Image Source: Pinterest There is an unquestionable link between elevated traffic and elevated sales. Applying social media strategies for your E-commerce business helps to get more traffic. Hence, in the end, social media helps to drive business sales. Here we have gathered a few unignorable social media strategies to drive traffic to your eCommerce store. Optimize social media profiles Social media is a primary tool to drive traffic to your eCommerce website. As you need to optimize your store for search engines, the same way social media profiles must also be optimized. Optimizing social media helps for higher rankings in search engines. Social media plays a significant role in building brand marketing and recognition. Your social media cover photos and profile picture is the first thing the user will see when they will visit your page. Every social media platform has a different dimension for pictures. Optimize the images accordingly for the better visibility of your social media profiles. Another way to optimize your social media profile is to add links to your other social media profiles. This will help users easily connect with you on other platforms. Next, make sure your social media biography is filled up perfectly. Ensure you do not miss out on any profile details to be filled up. Be consistent in the information you add about your brand within all the social media platforms. Follow the 3S (Stable, Short, and Sweet) Consistency is important for your social media. Consistency builds your brand recognition for your audience. Being consistent helps to grow audience engagement and greater reach. Be stable in your post content. Make sure you do not post too much of certain content and inadequate of the other one. Make a social media plan for posting different kinds of content on social media. Use social media scheduling tools to post every day’s content on all platforms. Post each and every day to increase your organic reach. Posting every day is a chance for you to reach your audience. Image Source: Auburn Advertising Not too short, not too long posts create a win-win situation for your brand. Posts with lengthy content are unappealing. This goes the same for hashtags. Hashtags used to get into the trending topic. But using too many can prove to be messy and useless. The visual appearance of your social media profiles also plays an important role in driving traffic to your E-commerce website. Follow a theme for your social media posts. Or you can have the same filter of the images you post on social media. Benefit from Social Media Advertising If you are looking for a new targeted audience, social media advertising is all-important. Social media advertising or social media targeting is the advertisements on social media platforms to attract new customers. Social media advertising helps in increasing conversions and sales of your brand. Before advertising on social media, first, you must know your target audience. Learn from your organic posts. You might be already posting on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Track which posts are being clicked, shared, liked, or commented on. These insights help you out with social media ads to be run at the right time to reach more users. One more thing to keep in mind while advertising via social media is the budget. You must pay for what you want. If you want more engagement and you are paying for impressions, it will just disturb your financial plans. Also acknowledge, which social media platform is relevant for your brand niche to get more reach. If your goal is to target teens, Snapchat or Instagram is most favorable. Provide social proof Social proof is a powerful and essential tool for marketing in modern times. Social proof basically explains, if this product or service worked for them in the same situation, it will also work for me. Types of social proofs may include customer reviews, customer testimonials, user-generated content, case studies, and certifications or awards. According to Spiegel, 95% of customers check for customer reviews before making a purchase. For B2C brands, providing a number of products sold or subscribers is very effective. While for B2B, testimonials and case studies are useful. The efficient trick is to be real rather than showing off. Besides building brand awareness and trust, social proof helps you rank higher on Google. Share the stories and reviews of your customers on social media to help the audience know more about your brand and help them make a decision for buying. Grab attention with appealing content Social media content that has a “WOW” factor helps to engage users and impresses them. Images, videos, infographics, gifs, interactive content can be included in your brand’s social media posts to grab attention. Choose high-quality images for posting and avoid using bad fonts that will distract your audience from the visuals. Adding short videos help to understand the product more briefly. Infographics are more concise and eye-catching. They help to understand the matter more precisely. GIFs are dynamic and are moving content to grab the user’s attention. You can show your brand’s fun side with GIFs. Engage customers with interactive content like polls, puzzles, quizzes, Q/A. This helps to improve the communication gap between the brand and the targeted audiences. Apart from this, share trending content or viral content. Sharing the most talked-about matter on social media helps to increase user engagement. Engage the audience by sharing trending memes, rather than just promoting your products and services. Come up with offers and discounts Besides educating and serving customers, social media can be used to incentivize customers to drive sales. There are several ways to reward your customers. Create a rush with pre-order offers. Let your customers enjoy the product at discounted price for the orders they have made prior to the launch of the product. Run flash sales to offer price drops for a limited period of time. This will create a sense of urgency amongst social media users. Offer a promo code to your customers to increase excitement and engagement. Run a campaign for your website and post it on social media to let people get aware of it. It is ok to post multiple times about your discount offers as it may happen that people miss your first post. Run a giveaway or contest to attract new customers and bring engagement to your social media profiles. It creates a positive impression of the brand on the customer’s mind. It may not lead to immediate sales but it is surely going to benefit you in the long run. Join groups and communities Participating in social groups and communities helps you learn a lot about your target audience. Listen to the conversations in the group and you can know a lot about your audience’s interests and behavior. Social media groups help to create better content for your other social media platforms by knowing more about your audience. You get new ideas for content by seeing other people’s work. Image Source: Business 2 Community You get a chance to have one-to-one communication with your audience that makes them feel heard and well attended. Well-attended audiences are your asset as they will help in mouth-to-mouth advertising. In addition to this, brands get new opportunities for employment. Thus groups and communities are a great way to put your brand in front of a large number of audiences and get noticed. Conclusion: Hence, if the above-discussed social media strategies are implemented for your business, then they can do wonders for your business. After implementing the above strategies check out the insights for your social media channels. That will help you whether it is working or not. Putting in the right efforts for your social media marketing will lead to increased traffic, brand awareness, customer engagement, conversion rates which ultimately grow your business. Thus, social media is a game-changer for E-commerce websites. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Yash Chawlani.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Yash Chawlani Follow @yashchawlani Yash Chawlani is a Freelance Content Marketing Strategist who is known by his personal brand Merlin. He specializes in SEO and Social Media and helps B2B and SaaS companies out there with his top-notch content strategies. In his spare time, you can either find him in the gym or on the… View full profile ›More by this author:How B2B Companies Can Leverage An Omnichannel Marketing Funnel to Improve Lead Nurturing5 Easy Ways to Introduce Automation Into Your Recruiting WorkflowHow Memes Stormed the Marketing World