As the popularity in online shopping continues to grow, your store faces a unique challenge – and tremendous opportunity. You need to stand out from the crowd and compete effectively with other stores for valuable traffic and sales. Social media marketing helps drive traffic to your site when you use it effectively. Here are some key tips you can use to see your online store business grow.
1) Check Your Timings (And Post Daily)
When it comes to social media you really do need to post consistently and update your feed at least once a day for Facebook, and five to six times a day for Twitter. It does depend on your audience – some target audiences appreciate many more posts than others – so make sure to test different schedules and check engagement and uptake. The time of day you post is important, and you can improve your engagement dramatically when you get it right. Again, pay attention to your audience, test, and retest.
2) Put Social Buttons on your Store
Increase social media impressions by giving people an easy chance to connect with your social media accounts – put social buttons on your online store on every page, in blog posts, and in your email newsletter and email signature. Give people plenty of chances to choose the social media they prefer to interact with, and you will get more traffic to your store.
3) Set Up an Automated Review Feature
Reviews next to your products are very powerful. They help people choose your product over a competitor by providing confidence and security, and they help people choose between your products so they get the best fit for their needs – which increases the chances that they will buy from you again. There are apps available to integrate reviews into the buying process and encourage people to leave reviews after they purchase, which will improve traffic to your online store. It is also a good idea to manually look at the reviews you get through social media, and use these to interact with your audience and also to make improvements or changes to product design.
4) Use Images on Facebook
Engagement with your product and your brand increases dramatically when you use images. And when you run an online shop it’s pretty easy to get images within your social media messages. Of course the image must be relevant and appealing to your audience, so make sure you are looking at the right kind of images for your needs.
5) Run Twitter Q&As
Twitter is great for posting updates about your brand and store, but you can go further with Twitter and utilize the platform for optimum engagement. Host a weekly Twitter Q&A session where your community posts questions about your products, or your brand, or anything related to the lifestyle you are promoting, and you answer them. It’s a good way to give a personal touch to your social media. People really appreciate a brand that has a human face – even when that shows through social media.
6) Create Micro Content
While in-depth, informative posts are ideal for boosting your search engine rankings, often people want information that is highly quick and easy to digest. Take a look at Vine videos where you can create mini 6-second clips that people can easily watch and share. Your store products, or more widely your brand, can be encapsulated in a short enough time to catch anyone’s attention. Play with video and see what works for your store.
7) Look at the Language in Your Blog Post Titles
Direct more people to your brand and store with effective titles to your blog posts. Again, as with a lot of social media marketing, it is all about experimentation and testing to see what works for your particular niche. As a start, think about using everyday language, keep titles fairly short, work on dramatic psychological traits such as desire, urgency etc., use negatives to mix it up, and start posts with the number of points you are going to make.
8) Make it Easy to Share
If a customer loves your product you certainly need to make it easy for them to tell their social universe how much they love it. It’s a fact that people tend to post more when they have a negative experience, but you can make it easier for people to share when they like something when you use buttons linking to social media sites within your store. You can also offer incentives – money off for a recommendation via Facebook, for example, or the chance to win if they share their review with their followers.
Image via Stuart Miles/ freedigitalphotos.net
Image via fantasista/ freedigitalphotos.net
