Easy Ways to Improve Social Media on an E-Commerce Website
Ecommerce websites have been repeatedly told that social media plays an important role in boosting online business. With social media, you can forge a more personal and intimate relationships with your consumer base, heighten awareness of your brand, and even increase sales altogether. But it seems that not everyone’s been told how to uses social media correctly. If you didn’t get the memo, here’s what you missed.
Use social sharing buttons.
They should be prominent on your webpage and they should include the most popular social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. You may as well use Google+ too as a nod to your SEO needs.
These social sharing buttons serve as a reminder of the social media aspect of your business, and they also make it conveniently easy for your visitors to engage and share your content.
Embed a Twitter widget.
This is a handy way for you to show an overview of what your social media content is all about. Here, your visitor can quickly see all the updates you’ve had, including all your promos, sales, discounts, and freebies. You can just download the widget from Twitter and embed it on your ecommerce website. For WordPress users, you can use a plugin for your Twitter feed such as the Kebo Twitter Feed.
Host a weekly Q&A.
Once a week, invite your Facebook or Twitter community to ask anything that’s related to your products, company, or industry. Choose the best questions and include them in your blog post. You can also answer as many as you can. This approach helps educate your consumer base, and at the same time you get content for your posts. By answering their questions, you also build your reputation as an expert.
Enable social login.
Since nowadays just about everyone has a social profile, they can use their favorite social media website to log on to your website. This can enlarge the number of your customer base, since there’s no clunky login and password form to fill up first. Plugins for social login is easily available from providers like OneAll.
Run a contest.
You always want your customers to engage, and one way of getting them to participate more actively is to run an interesting contest. One shipping company asked for ideas on what to do with a used shipping container. Another idea is to run a Pinterest treasure hunt in which one image provides clues for the next. You can then gather the winners and enter them into a raffle.
There are many types of contests you can run on social networks. You can post a quiz and have people answer it, you can ask for interesting images and photos, or you can have people come up with new slogans. Absolut Vodka did this once, and the winning concept (“Vodka corrupts / Absolut Vodka corrupts absolutely”) was rewarded and used in their advertising. You can run contests on your BigCommerce theme with PunchTab.
Encourage reviews.
Some ecommerce website owners are leery of reviews, since they can just as easily post something negative about your products and services. But if you are proud of the quality of your offerings or you can justify whatever gripe people have against you, then reviews are great. This offers you an easy way to address concerns publicly, and many customers feel better about your company when you take time and effort to respond to various complaints. At the very least, you can apologize and promise to do better. You may even have some others in your community defending you. You can even make it easy for your customers to post reviews about the products they bought from you. It’s even easy for you when you use an app like Yotpo that sends an email to buyers to help them become reviewers.
Reward loyalty.
One of the potential ways of using social media is that your community can be your marketing people as well. Offer discounts, and then offer coupons for people who share the discounts with their friends. Every time their friends buy something from you at a discount, the sharer enjoys greater discounts on all their future purchases too. You can use S Loyalty plugins for this.
Sell your products directly on Facebook Store.
In the old days, websites were used to advertise and promote shops in the real world. It was only alter that it became common to sell products directly online. The customer doesn’t have to go out and find your shop to buy something, because your website already enables them to buy online.
The Facebook Store is an extension of this principle. Now your community members don’t have to leave Facebook and go you your website to buy something. They can just buy from Facebook directly. It’s faster and much more expedient for your Facebook friends.
Social media can truly boost your business—just employ these easy tips and you’ll see an immediate improvement in your social media returns.
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