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It’s difficult to overstate the value of social media marketing in today’s digital landscape. As an ecommerce brand you can use social media to achieve many of your marketing goals. Social media can increase brand recognition and loyalty, improve your organic presence in search engine rankings, and create an engaged customer-base. Read on to discover the ways you can best leverage social media as part of your ecommerce marketing strategy.

Keep customers happy

One of the best ways to leverage social media for your brand is to use it to keep your customers happy. Happy customers, after all, are likely to become brand loyalists and lifetime devotees.

Customer Service

Providing top-notch customer service is one of the best ways to ensure customer loyalty. Customers feel confident buying online when they know any concerns or issues they have will be remedied quickly by the brand. While many customer service inquires are handled by phone or email, many can also be quickly dispatched on social media. Twitter in particular is a platform that’s well-suited to handling customer service issues. Handling customer service via your social media accounts has the added benefit of showing users who haven’t yet experienced an issue that your brand stands behind its products and goes the extra mile to serve its customers. 

Transparency

Smart ecommerce brands don’t shy away from criticism or legitimate customer complaints. Instead, they engage with this type of feedback by giving honest, thoughtful responses. Here’s a great example from the leading ecommerce brand, Everlane, who recently received some complaints about discrepancies in pricing between the same items for men and women (a men’s sweater priced lower than the same sweater for women, for example.) They took that feedback and wrote a considered response, then shared it more widely with their entire social following on Facebook.

Transparency is the philosophy that Everlane is built on, but even for an ecommerce brand that isn’t founded on that principle, openness and candor on social media goes a long way toward endearing your brand with customers.

Let us get to know you

Your social media channels are the best places online to showcase the personality of your brand. Social media is a way to speak directly to users and customers and to let them get to know you a bit better. Ultimately, if users feel they know you, they’re more likely to trust you which means you’ll be able to turn them into customers and brand loyalists.

Brand Storytelling

The visual nature of many social media channels makes it easy for brands to tell stories about themselves and their products. For most ecommerce brands marketing isn’t just about showcasing your products and highlighting their benefits, it’s about creating a lifestyle or ethos that defines the products you sell. You can use social media to share that lifestyle with your users and inspire them to see themselves, or a version of themselves they aspire to be, reflected in your brand. 

Brand Heroes

Another way to let people get to know your ecomm brand is to introduce them to the people who make your brand amazing. People want to shop from a brand they trust and pulling back the curtain to reveal the people toiling behind the scenes is a great way to build that trust. Showcasing your company’s heroes will make your brand feel less like a faceless entity and more like a close friend. 

Invest in paid media

When it comes to social media, there is no shortage of advertising opportunities. Your future customers are on social media and it’s worthwhile to invest in social media ads as part of your overall social strategy.

Strategic targeting

Social media advertising gives your ecommerce brand the opportunity to target users and user groups who are likely to be interested in your products. Facebook, in particular, offers the ability to target users based on some pretty specific demographic information. You can, for example, target users based on life events. If you’re a home goods store, you might target people who have recently moved. If you sell baby products you could target couples who recently welcomed a baby into their home. You also have the opportunity to show ads to users who have recently been on your site but haven’t completed a purchase (also known as retargeting) 

Influencer Marketing

Social media influencers are a great way to get your brand in front of a new audience. Think of influencers as tastemakers – people follow them because they’re trendy, or fashionable, or cool, and they usually have sizable social media followings. As a result, an influencer’s followers are perfectly primed to want to buy anything he or she is seen wearing or using. Partnering with the right social media influencers in your space can help up your brand awareness game by a lot.