Growing your business online can take a while. It’s often a slow process that requires careful planning to ensure that you reach the right audience.
It’s all about building your discoverability online with an organic approach. Many businesses throw money at the problem and advertise on multiple different platforms to drown out their competition. While effective in some cases, taking an organic approach ensures that you can sustain a good reputation. It helps you reach an audience that has a higher chance of converting into paying customers.
Social media is a key component of any e-commerce business’s online strategy. Between Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, you have an audience that stretches into the billions. With such a large group of potential customers, it should come as no surprise that companies spend large sums of money just to get noticed on social media. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get noticed. You need to take a delicate approach to uphold your reputation as a reliable business and reach the right people. To assist you, here are a couple of tips on how to promote your e-commerce business on social media.
Have a website worth advertising
Advertising on social media is essentially drawing attention to your website. You could spend a lot of time and money perfecting your social media strategy, but if it directs your customers to a poorly-made website then it’s going to be a waste of time. Before you start promoting your e-commerce business on social media, you have to ensure that your website is up to scratch.
In the past, this involved hiring a web developer to work on your website. Today, there are e-commerce website builders that serve the same function at a much lower cost. Creating a professional e-commerce website is simple thanks to the multiple templates offered. There’s also deep customization to ensure your website stands out from others. There are simple tools to add and edit products, and you can even set up payment providers and shipping options.
Choose the right social media platform for your business
Not all social media platforms are equal. The type of business you operate will change the ideal platform for your promotional campaign. Here’s a rough idea of what each platform specialises in:
- Facebook – Over 2.6 billion monthly active users. Great for visual advertising and showing strong value propositions. Can use videos as well. However, there’s a lot of competition which leads to lower conversion rates and difficulty building an audience.
- Twitter – Over 320 million monthly active users. Excellent for building brand personality, leans towards humorous tweets and interactions with other users. May require a dedicated social media manager. Visual appeal helps, but the key focus should be on engaging your customers.
- Instagram – Over 1 billion monthly active users. Biggest age group is between 18-29, making it perfect for appealing to young adults. Requires a lot of creativity due to the focus on visual content. Most popular with millennials.
- LinkedIn – Over 675 million monthly active users. Most popular with ages between 30 and 64. Much heavier focus on business and professionalism. Community is a little less active but can be an excellent niche platform for professional services.
- TikTok is often referred to as a “lip-syncing” app, which makes it sound like it’s some online karaoke experience. But a closer comparison would be Vine, Twitter’s still sorely missed short-form video app whose content lives on as YouTube compilations.
These four are the main social media platforms that you should consider promoting your business on. There are other platforms such as YouTube and Pinterest to also consider, but they’re not strictly social media since they focus on video and image content respectively.
Choosing the ideal platform to promote your business is important when you’re a small e-commerce business. Spreading your focus across multiple platforms can be difficult to manage. Invest in a single platform where you have the highest chance of connecting with your audience, then focus on establishing a presence before spreading to another platform.
Link content between your social media and website
It’s also important to share the content on your e-commerce website on your social media platforms. Whether it’s talking about a specific product you offer or even linking to your blog, there are a number of different options for crossposting.
If your website has a blog or a news section, it’s a great idea to also add sharing widgets to allow your audience to post it on their own social media accounts. Product and service pages should also be shareable on social media.
