Introduction
Online retail sales are anticipated to grow 10 percent annually for the next five
years, accounting for 53 percent of all U.S. retail sales by 2014.
- Forrester Research.
Females make up 57.9 percent and males 42.1 percent of internet
users who made any type of purchase online.
Ad spending has reached nearly $450 billion per year and the fastest growth
areas in digital are social media and ecommerce. In 2010, we saw the rise
of flash sale sites, such as HauteLook and Rue La La and the discount site
Groupon.Total advertising spending currently an $449.7 billion per year.
Of the global ad spend, web marketing will rise from 14 to 18 percent in 2013
mostly driven by video and social media.
Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%)
61% of Facebook users are middle aged or older, with the average age being 37
StumbleUpon Drives More Than 50% of Social Media Traffic.
18- to 24-year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site,
they’re spread out all over - Stats from Pingdom.
7 Tools for Social Media eCommerce
Twitter & Facebook Updates
Facebook and Twitter dominate the social media space. With their social
networking capabilities at your disposal, you can reach out to fans and
friends in a scope that word-of-mouth advertising could never come close to.
Blog
Blog is an online journal which for business owners can be a powerful tool
to keep your customers “in the loop” about your store’s news and updates.
Use a blog to post news about your upcoming products. Post some ideas
about how your products can be used, or offer your customers updates
about new features within your store. A built-in blog capability lets you
schedule and manage your posts, and provides an industry standard RSS
feed to provide syndication capabilities for your blog.
Facebook Store
You can create a Facebook Fan page for your business, and use it to
advertise your store. Acquire fans to your store and post business specific
updates about your business to them. But why stop there? With a Facebook
Application, you can easily link your online store directly to your Facebook
Fan Page within its own tab. Select which products are displayed, such as
products within a specific category, Home Specials or items “On Sale”.
What’s more, you can empower your affiliates with the ability to create their
own online stores within their Facebook profiles and choose which products
will be displayed.
YouTube Video Integration
Bring your products to life and improve your visitor experience by adding
video footage to your product pages. Product images are important, but
a full motion video of your product can really help you sell it to your
customers. YouTube video integration lets you easily search YouTube
directly from your store’s control panel, select a video – whether it’s
a product review, demonstration or viral commercial – and instantly display
it on your product page.
Social Bookmarking
Visitors to your site may not always buy at that specific moment in time,
but will likely return to your store when they’re ready to purchase. Make
it easy for them to return to their favorite products by adding social
bookmarking to your products. With Social Bookmarking added to
your item listings, your customers can instantly bookmark individual
products to their browsers, email, or even to the popular social sites
like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and Twitter at the click of a button.
Facebook “Like” Button
Add a Facebook “Like” button to your products and let your customers
advertise your products for you on their Facebook pages. Their friends
can see this and perhaps take enough of an interest in the item to become
your customer as well.
Embracing Mobile Apps
Mobile phones today are so much more than just phones. In fact, these are
essentially hand-held computers complete with Web browsing capabilities
used by consumers to share products, information and comments with
their friends in real-time. It is important to provide a complete mobile
interface for visitors shopping your site on an iPhone or favorite smartphone
You will want to include optimized pages for Home, Products, Categories,
View Cart and Checkout. That way, visitors can easily browse and add
products to their cart and checkout, all within the Mobile interface.
Five Social Media Tips for Ecommerce Marketing
1. Track Customer Communication Channel
Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn and YouTube, there’s no limit to the number
of social networking channels available for your business to leverage.
Key to successful social media marketing for ecommerce is choosing the
right channels to reach customers.
Customer Survey: Customer polls can suggest the most prefered social
channel for interaction. Monitoring social sites: Use a free tool like Social
Mention or Trackur. For something far more robust use tools like Radian6
to discover how and where customers are talking about your brand, your
competitors or target keywords.
Leveraging the stats: Some sites like Facebook are transparent when it
comes to user statistics. Or leverage research conducted by third-party
firms like eMarketer.
Revivew: backlinks, job postings, news announcements and keyword
rankings of competitors on a regular basis to get a glimpse into their
online marketing health.
2. Track Competitor
Whether your ecommerce business is new to social media marketing, or
just need to take your efforts up a notch, competitive intelligence can be very
useful. Spend some time by conducting a competitive audit of your top
five competitors on the social web. Include:
The social sites in which they are active
The type of content they publish on the social web
The number of followers/fans/views they have on each site
How they promote specific products, programs or events via social media
3. Promote Exclusive Offers Through Social Media
In order for your ecommerce business to gain a following on whatever
social channel you choose, entice customers with something they can’t
get anywhere else.
For example, promote a contest via social media in the client’s blog
and Facebook fan page to promote a Halloween contest to name the
best costume. This initiative not only drove additional traffic to the
client’s website, but also helped increase the number of Facebook fans.
Alternately, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such
as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can also offer “breaking news”
that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements
or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.
4. Don’t Just Push Products and Promotions
The primary goal of your ecommerce site may be to sell products, but
your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range
of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing
and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.
Incorporate some of these ideas into your ecommerce social media
marketing strategy:
Share messages or news stories from external sources
Create a blog on your website and feed blog content to your social accounts
Ask questions, participate in discussions or poll your customers via social
media. Post pictures from company events or videos from your CEO’s
speaking engagements
5. Introduce Social Media Outlets
1-800-Flowers first ecommerce site to launch a Facebook store, allowing
customers to browse and purchase its products directly through Facebook
and JC Penny maximizes the use of social media for its marketing efforts.
1-800-Flowers may be an extreme case, but ecommerce sites large and
small can still indirectly sell products through their social profiles.
There are plenty of third party facebook applications for promoting
facebook ecommerce.
For example:
Best Buy provides a link to the order page on your website. It may not
be quite as simple as purchasing directly from the social profile, but it can
be just as effective.
Online retail sales are anticipated to grow 10 percent annually for the next five
years, accounting for 53 percent of all U.S. retail sales by 2014.
- Forrester Research.
Females make up 57.9 percent and males 42.1 percent of internet
users who made any type of purchase online.
Ad spending has reached nearly $450 billion per year and the fastest growth
areas in digital are social media and ecommerce. In 2010, we saw the rise
of flash sale sites, such as HauteLook and Rue La La and the discount site
Groupon.Total advertising spending currently an $449.7 billion per year.
Of the global ad spend, web marketing will rise from 14 to 18 percent in 2013
mostly driven by video and social media.
Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%)
61% of Facebook users are middle aged or older, with the average age being 37
StumbleUpon Drives More Than 50% of Social Media Traffic.
18- to 24-year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site,
they’re spread out all over - Stats from Pingdom.
7 Tools for Social Media eCommerce
Twitter & Facebook Updates
Facebook and Twitter dominate the social media space. With their social
networking capabilities at your disposal, you can reach out to fans and
friends in a scope that word-of-mouth advertising could never come close to.
Blog
Blog is an online journal which for business owners can be a powerful tool
to keep your customers “in the loop” about your store’s news and updates.
Use a blog to post news about your upcoming products. Post some ideas
about how your products can be used, or offer your customers updates
about new features within your store. A built-in blog capability lets you
schedule and manage your posts, and provides an industry standard RSS
feed to provide syndication capabilities for your blog.
Facebook Store
You can create a Facebook Fan page for your business, and use it to
advertise your store. Acquire fans to your store and post business specific
updates about your business to them. But why stop there? With a Facebook
Application, you can easily link your online store directly to your Facebook
Fan Page within its own tab. Select which products are displayed, such as
products within a specific category, Home Specials or items “On Sale”.
What’s more, you can empower your affiliates with the ability to create their
own online stores within their Facebook profiles and choose which products
will be displayed.
YouTube Video Integration
Bring your products to life and improve your visitor experience by adding
video footage to your product pages. Product images are important, but
a full motion video of your product can really help you sell it to your
customers. YouTube video integration lets you easily search YouTube
directly from your store’s control panel, select a video – whether it’s
a product review, demonstration or viral commercial – and instantly display
it on your product page.
Social Bookmarking
Visitors to your site may not always buy at that specific moment in time,
but will likely return to your store when they’re ready to purchase. Make
it easy for them to return to their favorite products by adding social
bookmarking to your products. With Social Bookmarking added to
your item listings, your customers can instantly bookmark individual
products to their browsers, email, or even to the popular social sites
like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and Twitter at the click of a button.
Facebook “Like” Button
Add a Facebook “Like” button to your products and let your customers
advertise your products for you on their Facebook pages. Their friends
can see this and perhaps take enough of an interest in the item to become
your customer as well.
Embracing Mobile Apps
Mobile phones today are so much more than just phones. In fact, these are
essentially hand-held computers complete with Web browsing capabilities
used by consumers to share products, information and comments with
their friends in real-time. It is important to provide a complete mobile
interface for visitors shopping your site on an iPhone or favorite smartphone
You will want to include optimized pages for Home, Products, Categories,
View Cart and Checkout. That way, visitors can easily browse and add
products to their cart and checkout, all within the Mobile interface.
Five Social Media Tips for Ecommerce Marketing
1. Track Customer Communication Channel
Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn and YouTube, there’s no limit to the number
of social networking channels available for your business to leverage.
Key to successful social media marketing for ecommerce is choosing the
right channels to reach customers.
Customer Survey: Customer polls can suggest the most prefered social
channel for interaction. Monitoring social sites: Use a free tool like Social
Mention or Trackur. For something far more robust use tools like Radian6
to discover how and where customers are talking about your brand, your
competitors or target keywords.
Leveraging the stats: Some sites like Facebook are transparent when it
comes to user statistics. Or leverage research conducted by third-party
firms like eMarketer.
Revivew: backlinks, job postings, news announcements and keyword
rankings of competitors on a regular basis to get a glimpse into their
online marketing health.
2. Track Competitor
Whether your ecommerce business is new to social media marketing, or
just need to take your efforts up a notch, competitive intelligence can be very
useful. Spend some time by conducting a competitive audit of your top
five competitors on the social web. Include:
The social sites in which they are active
The type of content they publish on the social web
The number of followers/fans/views they have on each site
How they promote specific products, programs or events via social media
3. Promote Exclusive Offers Through Social Media
In order for your ecommerce business to gain a following on whatever
social channel you choose, entice customers with something they can’t
get anywhere else.
For example, promote a contest via social media in the client’s blog
and Facebook fan page to promote a Halloween contest to name the
best costume. This initiative not only drove additional traffic to the
client’s website, but also helped increase the number of Facebook fans.
Alternately, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such
as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can also offer “breaking news”
that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements
or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.
4. Don’t Just Push Products and Promotions
The primary goal of your ecommerce site may be to sell products, but
your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range
of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing
and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.
Incorporate some of these ideas into your ecommerce social media
marketing strategy:
Share messages or news stories from external sources
Create a blog on your website and feed blog content to your social accounts
Ask questions, participate in discussions or poll your customers via social
media. Post pictures from company events or videos from your CEO’s
speaking engagements
5. Introduce Social Media Outlets
1-800-Flowers first ecommerce site to launch a Facebook store, allowing
customers to browse and purchase its products directly through Facebook
and JC Penny maximizes the use of social media for its marketing efforts.
1-800-Flowers may be an extreme case, but ecommerce sites large and
small can still indirectly sell products through their social profiles.
There are plenty of third party facebook applications for promoting
facebook ecommerce.
For example:
Best Buy provides a link to the order page on your website. It may not
be quite as simple as purchasing directly from the social profile, but it can
be just as effective.
Conclusion
If you aren’t discovering which in social networking channels your customers
spend time and include them in your ecommerce marketing mix, you’re
probably missing out on building relationships, community and increasing
new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.
probably missing out on building relationships, community and increasing
new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.
Social media is the best environment where the ecommerce customer relationship thrives best.
References
1. http://smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2010/06/7-tools-for-social-media-ecomm.html/
2. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/812-Employing-Social-Media
3. http://sparxoo.com/2011/02/02/ecommerce-social-media-stats/
4. http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/ecommerce-marketing-social-media-tips/
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