Social Networks And e-Commerce: Guide To Your Online Store

Is your online store online but still not attracting enough conversions? See in this article how to make the best of social media to amplify the reach of your e-commerce and increase opportunities and sales.

Social networks for e-commerce: the basics

The first step is to understand your business persona and where these people consume content the most. What are the most used social networks? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest? Knowing where users are is the first step to a successful campaign.

Next, you must determine a strategy and content cadence to build a long-term relationship with users and potential customers.

Making spaced publications without visual identity and without a strategy behind it is no use; the most you’ll get with this is wasting your time. To get the best out of social media for your e-commerce, you need to plan.

Finally, you need to measure results regularly and test new formats to expand reach, clicks, and interactions further.

But how do you amplify that and go beyond the basics?

Social media planning for e-commerce

Based on what has been drawn above, we will further explore each step of the social media strategy. Look:

1. Construction of visual identity and objectives

The first step is to understand the brand identity, what the positioning will be, and the primary objectives will be.

What is the store about? What products are sold? Are there any criteria or relevant aspects to highlight (ecologically correct products, social causes, or others) that are linked to the project’s identity?

One way to consider this is to determine, through the persona study, what are the main pain points of ideal customers and build a communication network around that.

For example, a store that sells cosmetic products for tattoos may have customers whose most considerable pain is maintaining the quality of their tattoos in the long run.

Because of this, you can create a communication like “Tired of coming back to reinforce your tattoo from year to year? Your skin might be frayed…” and go from there.

After that, define colors based on the existing brand logo and visual plan. If you don’t have one, it is recommended that you think about it. From there, define the primary objectives of the social media strategy.

Do you want 50 more people a month budgeting in your store? 10% growth in sales generated by social media? Establish criteria and fundamental objectives to have a planned and realistic growth.

2. Mapping of publications and definition of cadence

Every social network wants users to spend more time interacting with apps. Therefore, the algorithms prioritize who publishes recurrently.

At the beginning of most strategies, however, this is unfeasible. Unless you have a large team and considerable resources to invest in publications, the idea is to focus on an ongoing strategy – quality over quantity.

An average of two to three weekly publications is enough to start working with social networks. A tip that helps a lot in planning publications is the use of fixed editorials.

Is Monday the preferred day to order gym clothes from your store? Provide physical activity tips for people to do at home and remind users of the benefits of performing an activity in comfortable clothing.

Is Wednesday the day with the most tool budgets on your site? Take the opportunity to highlight specific products and drive sales even more.

Does your e-commerce have a blog with enriching content? Drive users to relevant articles and capture leads that aren’t ready to buy yet.

3. Follow-up of results

There is no way to talk about social media management without monitoring results and analyzing performance.

What are the days that yield the most opportunities? Posts with emojis generate more responses in stories? What is the average CPC value of paid posts?

Create a table and generate monthly reports to understand if your networks grow along with your e-commerce or if new bottlenecks are emerging.

That way, you can also know which editorials are more successful, which publications bring more results and which posts can be eliminated in the next monthly planning.

4. Paid media on social networks for e-commerce

Today, it is impossible to talk about social media management for e-commerce without talking about paid media. Boosting posts is the fastest way to attract more users or drive more conversions.

There are several ways to use Facebook Ads to advertise (both on Facebook and Instagram).

Here, we will specifically focus on two and their ramifications for different strategies: Traffic and Engagement.

The use of traffic strategies in paid media serves to redirect the user to another place outside the networks. This creates some challenges: firstly, social networks don’t want users to leave their platforms to take other actions.

Second, users don’t want to be interrupted in their browsing unless they have a good reason to. Therefore, traffic ads must have excellent images and really converting, direct and efficient text.

In the case of Engagement strategies, we have publications whose primary focus is to engage and generate more interaction with the post itself: likes, shares, comments, etc.

For brands just starting out, Engagement posts are constructive in building a following. However, it is essential to remember that these publications must still generate value for users, improving their relationship in the long term.

5. Customer service

Social networks generate many gains in fostering a new audience and new customers, but you should never forget the consumers already in your base. This is even one of the pillars of Flywheel Marketing, which is a new way of thinking about attraction marketing known as Inbound Marketing.

Conduct customer service, answer questions and highlight loyal customers. These are some of the strategies for customer service on social networks.

Have you got compliments? Ask permission to share them. Create a particular hashtag for customers to share their stories and product usage.

Got reviews? Deal with complaints before they turn into an even bigger headache.

Social networks are a place of interaction. The ideal is to establish criteria for monitoring networks according to the average volume of comments, responses, and interactions. Once a day, however, is often an adequate average to check for new relevant interactions.

Conclusion

You can use social media in your e-commerce strategies and leverage the results generated.

However, this depends on planning and execution focused on quality deliveries. Don’t just try to bulk up with harmful posts or ads. Focus on a decent user experience and attract more and more customers to your e-commerce.