Social media already has emerged as the most essential marketing channel for businesses across sizes, niches and categories. While big brands need a social media presence to foster loyalty and create a stronger brand image, small businesses and startups need social media as the most inexpensive tool to reach a wider audience and push business growth.
For eCommerce businesses, social media comes as an invaluable tool to boost sales and promotion. Most leading eCommerce platforms now offer out-of-the-box social media extensions and tools to allow your business to find traction from early on.
While you may know the time tested methods to boost social media traction and engagement, you need to embrace some trending techniques and tactics to sharpen your social media presence in 2019.
Make Use of Live Video
Going live is the new trend across social channels. There has been a huge increase in social media live video in the past few years. Live videos particularly can play a significant role to boost engagement and sales, because they are famous for creating a sense of immediacy and instant engagement. According to social media expert Neil Patel, a whopping 80% of the audience like watching a live video instead of reading a blog post.
Whether most of your audience uses Facebook, or whether they rely on Snapchat or Instagram, you can always reach out to them with live video. While all social media platforms allow businesses to deliver live streaming video, an eCommerce business should utilise the full potential of this to boost sales and encourage audience engagement. Remember, live videos are unscripted and spontaneous, and that is why most people like them. So, always remain authentic and don’t manipulate an older video as live streaming.
Collaborate with Micro Influencers
While social media can bring to your brand a lot of focus and engagement, some people enjoying wider reach and regular traction can do it better. We call these people as social influencers. They enjoy command and influence over a lot of people who follows him. Even when you cannot make these big influencers talk about your brand you can at least get in touch with relatively smaller influencers who still have a lot of followers and a regular audience. Collaborating with this micro-influencers can open up new vistas of opportunity for your business.
With micro-influencers, you can reach a wider audience at a much lower cost compared to the traditional ads. An influencer can easily persuade people to trust your brand, unlike the media ads that people already consider commonplace and annoying. When using micro-influencers always be truthful about your offerings, as people now segregate so-called talk-talking ads from social media posts.
Utilise Social Proofs like Reviews and Recommendations
A vast majority of buyers now get influenced by the opinion of other consumers who are not known to them. Most people give more value to individual and unbiased recommendations than so-called media ads. The reviews, suggestions and positive comments on brands and products become the social proof of the brand’s credibility and the quality of the products.
Utilising micro and macro influencers who can influence their respective audience by talking on your brand is a good choice. But, you should also garner social proofs through user-generated contents such as user videos presenting your products and brands in a good light. You should also try to engage more people in conversation to leave a positive comment on your brand.
Utilise Intelligent Chatbots
Intelligent chatbots powered by cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning and AI have already transformed the online shopping experience and customer service. Now those chatbots are also available on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. You can utilise these intelligent chatbots and boost audience engagement on social platforms as well.
Deliver Personalised Social Experience
Finally, to make a strong and distinct impression on your users and to connect them emotionally, now you can utilise personalised contents on your social media pages as well. With the increase in the competition among brands, customers are getting more powerful with the ability to play a decisive role for brand presence.
Just because consumers now have a lot of choices and options to access the contents of their preference, delivering personalised contents became a crucial criterion for promoting brands. It is not only true with the online shopping experience but the social media experience of those eCommerce stores as well. With personalised contents, eCommerce stores can create a brand presence capable of making better and more frequent traction with the audience.
Personalized content is all about creating content specifically for a particular type of audience. That personalisation happens based on the user location, timing of content consumption, the devices in use, the type of contents they prefer and the frequency of their engagement. This is also about sharing those contents that enjoy more traction and audience engagement. Thanks to this approach, the contents shared on social channels can enjoy more traction and social engagement.
Question is, how you can create a personalised social media experience by using audience-specific contents and using other means. First of all, you need to target a few social channels that are likely to engage your audience. Secondly, you need to know your audience on every social channel you are targeting. You need to identify the kind of social media contents your audience in each channel prefers, and accordingly, you need to come up with a social media content strategy for your audience. Lastly, talk to the users directly and engage with them frequently to know their preference and accordingly fine-tune your content strategy.
Conclusion
Don’t have an impression that the above-mentioned ones are the only effective strategies to promote your eCommerce store across social channels. There are several other strategies that remained important throughout all these years. But the above-mentioned ones can actually play a more significant and more influencing role in 2019 and in the coming years.
Author Bio: Juned Ghachi is a co-founder and CMO of IndianAppDevelopers leading mobile app development company in India. Juned helps small to big brand companies in developing mobile applications across all mobile platforms for their business growth.