When it comes to selling eCommerce products via social media, it should be a matter of when it’s time to rethink your current strategy. To integrate social media with your eCommerce websites, you need to tap avenues such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, for starters. Don’t believe the hype, that you’re likely leaving money on the table. Social media remains a potential goldmine for budding eCommerce brands.
- Brands with smart social strategies, if you want customers to open their wallets, it’s crucial that they open up to you in their social feeds.
- More than 70% of consumer buying decisions are influenced by social media. It can’t be overstated: the more positive interactions you have with potential customers, the better.
- Businesses that focus on social networks builds a stronger base, in other words, it’s possible for customers to evangelize you.
How to Integrate Social Media with eCommerce Websites
The question remains; how do you actually make those sales happen? The answer is simple; integrate social media into your eCommerce websites.
Homepage Feeds
Homepage social feeds, especially Instagram, represent a powerful means of bringing your product to life on-site. Such feeds can help your site feel more human and display models showcasing your high-end products. If you decide to integrate a social feed, you need to ensure that your feed contains high-quality images. Perhaps even more powerful are the photos of customers using your products.
Social Buttons
Representing the low-hanging fruit of integrating social media, social buttons are an absolute must-do for any modern brand. It is especially true in an era where customers are spending the bulk of their time on Facebook or Instagram. You can also use social buttons to promote your brand and for visitors to hear about promotions you may be running.
- You must make sure that your buttons mesh with your site’s layout and color scheme
- There’s no need to make your buttons particularly “loud”, take a simple and subtle approach
- Don’t highlight the social platforms that you’re not active on if you’re only active on Facebook, and Twitter for example, don’t bother linking to your dead Pinterest page
Hashtags
Given that modern customers are hungry to evangelize the brands they support, there’s no easier way to encourage social sharing than by creating a hashtag. Hashtags represent much more than trending topics, granted you understand how to integrate them. It is not unlike social buttons, as hashtags can be implemented throughout your brand’s visual content. It offers to provide customers with a hub of discussion and sharing for your brand and its products.
Product Pages
Social media pages represent the modern word of mouth buyers; those who want to brag about the products they deem worthy. Therefore, you need to get into the social feeds of your audience to feed into your customer’s needs. Ensure that you have social sharing enabled on your product pages. Your product pages should provide a way for customers to receive one-click feedback on their next purchase.
- Don’t use the same social buttons on your homepage and product pages.
- Only offer to share with the social networks Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, where it makes sense. They are probably your best bet versus somewhere such as LinkedIn.
- Make sure that your plugin captures your product’s image and description appropriately.
Social Sign Ins
Many eCommerce brands thrive off of visitors who sign into their sites from Facebook, and other platforms. The benefit of social sign-ins is two-fold visitors can browse your site without creating a new account and can comment on your blog. One of the key reasons to integrate social media into your website is to encourage a steady stream of comments that are a positive signal for your products.
- You get real-time feedback regarding your business from readers and customers.
- Comments ultimately uncover what is buzzworthy, if you notice that a particular product is driving discussion to consider putting it at the forefront of your future marketing.
- Consistent comments signal that your site is alive, establishing your site as a bigger player in your space.
Social sign-ins from Facebook has become an incredibly popular means of encouraging on-site interactions. The user does not have to create a separate account, likewise, their comments have the potential to pop up news feeds of friends.
