What if you were told that there was more to social media than all those hours you spent playing Farmville on Facebook, stalking celebrities on twitter or looking up random cat videos friends shared on their timelines?
What if we told you that social media can actually help you and your online business make money? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Have we piqued your interest enough already? Then read on.
Social media is an opportunity for you to add customers to your site and increase your understanding of what your customers are looking for. A very effective way to involve them into your business, Social media is the latest arsenal in the war chest of an etailer when it comes to increasing bottom lines.
Now Social media is directly not a meaningful driver of traffic to an ecommerce site. It may not also directly affect purchase conversions on estores. Research proves that only 1.55% of all commerce traffic is represented by social media with a conversion rate of about .77%. Yet it is an inherent addition to the conversation funnel to your site, leading to an influx of customers. Some, if not a lot, of word of mouth is happening on social media and your brand mentions are vital for your business.
And yet, a lot of e commerce sites and estores do not make use of this huge opportunity. A Harvard Business School study says that only 12 percent of businesses fell the need to utilize social media effectively in their customer growth strategies
A lot to do with this abysmally low utilization of Social media is the fact that there often is no clear strategy or focus on social campaigns from a business point of view. Lets face it, Social media is not an easy marketing channel for the best of us. To design a comprehensive campaign that uses your presence on the “social scene” and then expects it to drive sales on your estore hence is a herculean task.
The other side to this is a lack of right understanding of what exactly it is that social media can add to your business. Why you need to maintain great profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and such are not exactly clear to many either. Then that is what we are here for right?
This is not a question you can afford to ask in today’s day and age. Yet if it is something you must know an answer to, well there are plenty of reasons.
With little ingenuity and smart strategizing, you can make social media the perfect engagement tool to not only get new customers but also constantly converse with them, make them know you are there right a click away and make them realize that you are always on the look out for what they want next, before they even realize that they do.
While the Social Media is a strange animal with a will of its own, it is not that difficult to tackle it by the horns if you know how to. We give you three solid tips that are easy to do and help you reap huge dividends:
1. Make Hashtags your friend- Lead generation, the very first principal of increasing customer base, is the first target on social media. And your weapon here is the humble Hashtag (#). Find a common and easy to remember use for your brand. For example, look at what Converse , the show brand did with its hashtag #AllStar- taking its tag line into a readily accessible and relatable hashtag that can be put to use in front of almost anything. Pics of how you wore your converse to a trek, selfies at a party, a fun contest thread, you name it.
2. Get the Social Birds to work for you– Get a Call to Action feature on your social presence always. These are simple requests to the customer to complete an action, like Signing up for a service, or Shop now, or “Add to my wishlist” etc. Within a social hub, an instant action like this can help you gauge the popularity of your product or service and also help increase sales on your site.
Flipkart does this so effortlessly, on its Twitter and Fb presence, with most of its posts having a “Buy now “ Button right next to it for the customer to be able to act on the impulse and purchase immediately. Simple conversion of a social impulse into an actual sale, isn’t it?
3. Social Testimonials- Get your amazing products testified by your customers. Make them let the world know how they swear they love your products and why. Add a social hub to your site, or product page, and get your customers to see how they can use your product better, or how good your product is via what other happy customers are saying. Social hubs, especially on a check out page are what Product reviews are fast morphing into. Getting on to a trend is always welcome in the ecommerce space isn’t it?
So now that you know how vital social media is to your business, why wait? Get started with revamping your page today by adding a social angle to it. Be part of this one big happy social family that has your customer at its center.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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