More and more e-commerce businesses are leveraging social media to gain online exposure, retain customers, land more conversions, and offer excellent customer service. In fact, over 90% of marketers claim that social media is important to their business (source). Why? Because that’s where their customers are spending time online. In fact, the average person spends around two hours on social media daily. Facebook alone has over one billion users each day. The above numbers show that implementing social media marketing is no longer optional for businesses, especially e-commerce companies and other online sellers. But you must do social media marketing the right way if you want to see high returns on your investment. Here are the dos and don’ts of social media marketing.
Do
Share High-Quality Visual Content
Four times as many consumers prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it. And high-quality images make it much more likely for a post to be viewed, as well as shared with others. For instance, Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. (source)
Use Paid Advertising and In-App Purchasing
With Facebook ads, you can determine who encounters your ads based on your preferred target audience and then track each ad’s performance. Other social media platforms are beginning to follow suit too. It’s never been easier or more cost effective to get your advertisements viewed by those who actually want to see them. You should also include in-app purchasing (perhaps in some of your ads) where a customer will click on a button to purchase something inside the social media app itself. While you shouldn’t do this for every single post you share, you will see more sales when you include in-app purchasing for new and featured products, as well as for items that are on sale.
Have a Messaging Strategy
Customers would much rather talk to a customer service representative via messaging on a social media app than talk to them on the phone, especially if they can access a representative at all hours of the day. WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger have seen record-breaking customer engagement numbers for businesses in the past few years.
Track Performance Metrics
If you really want to see if and how your social media marketing strategy is working, be sure to track and analyze how your posts are performing. Most apps, such as Facebook, will even automatically do this for you. You’ll want to look at metrics such as what types of posts get more likes and shares, what times of day your followers are more active, and how often you should be posting content.
Don’t
Start Posting Anything Without a Plan and Team in Place
Before posting anything on social media, know what kind of content you want to post, how much of it you want to post, and how often. Then, you’ll need to determine who should be creating, managing, and sharing the content, as well as who will connect with those users who engage with the content and make comments. You will stretch yourself or your business too thin if you don’t think about these things ahead of time.
Apply Automation Without Interacting with Your Followers
Using tools that automatically share posts for you on a schedule of your choosing is convenient and often necessary, if you don’t overdo it. However, you should never just set it and forget it. Social media is all about being social. For social media marketing to work, you need to engage with your customers in comment threads and respond to things they’re saying in real-time (at least within twenty-four hours).
Be Inconsistent with When and What You Post
If you post fifty posts in one week and only one post the next, it will throw your followers off. Eventually, most of them will stop following you. For maximum engagement, you’ll also want to be sure you’re sharing consistent types and numbers of posts. For instance, some brands have short funny videos or quizzes that followers will watch out for while they’re scrolling through their feeds.
Focus Only on Making Sales
People like to go on social media to be distracted from their daily lives a lot of the time. They want to be delighted and entertained. They want to encounter things they care about. They do not want a constant barrage of brands telling them to buy things. Simply being on social media platforms is not enough. If you want your social media marketing to work and show results, be sure to follow the dos and don’ts highlighted above.
