March 27, 2024

Social Media for eCommerce: Why & How to Create Content

Dasha Korsik

Content Team Lead

Ecommerce

Content Creation Strategies for Ecommerce Social Media

Dasha Korsik

Content Team Lead

Ecommerce

Content Creation Strategies for Ecommerce Social Media

Social media today are platforms that are increasingly connecting online merchants and customers. In ecommerce, social media marketing helps to outsell competitors and bring new audiences to web stores.

Give us 5 minutes and we will reveal some of the easiest yet powerful social media marketing tactics and practices that increase visits and conversions.

Introduction

Social media has proved a high-profit online sales environment over the past few years. According to the Digital 2020 July Global Statshot report produced by DataReportal in partnership with We Are Social and Hootsuite, the total number of active social media users has reached 3.96 billion. For ecommerce businesses, this number means 3.96 billion potential customers.

To hit this potential audience, a social media profile needs engaging quality content.

Below you’ll find some of the most easy-to-implement social media marketing (SMM) strategies that can help you to come up with numerous ideas of what to post to attract people to products and services, while also directing them to check out, converting into customers.

Top Reasons Why Businesses Use Social Media Marketing

Business owners are often hesitating when it comes to adopting a social media marketing strategy. Some are unsure of how it can benefit their business, while others are just unaware of the ways to use social media in a proper way as a marketing tool.

To sort out the doubts, we’ve collected key reasons that persuade many.

SMM will help:

1. Widen your audience reach

Through introducing social media into your ecommerce activity, you create a new, easy-to-use virtual storefront. Turning your business “social” will provide a way to showcase your brand to more than half of the world’s population.

2. Create value for money

Getting a profile is free of charge on most social media platforms. Additionally, certain platforms offer an option of turning an ordinary user profile into a business one, which is also free in most of the cases.

That is the reason why SMM makes a cost-effective instrument of promotion.

3. Increase brand-awareness

Social media ads are a paid option to promote your web store. Enabling your products and services to appear in the feeds of targeted social media users will help drive the interest and speed-up brand-awareness.

4. Show the human face of your brand

Social media is the place where people share thoughts and impressions. Turn this peculiarity into an advantage and opportunity to demonstrate the human face of your business.

Here’s how you can do it:

  • Introduce your staff. People want to do business with people, not faceless operations;
  • Showcase the production process. People love to take a sneak peek into “behind the scenes”;
  • Engage in conversations. People appreciate when business owners respond to their comments, taking care about complaints or concerns.

By letting people better understand how your products are made or what peculiarities/benefits your service might bring, you are building trust and a loyal community around your brand and trust to your business.

Leading Social Media Platforms for eCommerce

The number of social media platforms continues to grow. When you decide to promote your ecommerce activity through social media, the question is which platform to choose.

Out of all long-existing and today-emerging social media that work for ecommerce, we have made our Top-3 of die-hard social media channels you can use to scale your business.

1. Facebook

With more than 2.6 billion monthly active users (according to Statista), Facebook is not just the most popular social media network, but also a full-fledged platform for online merchants.

Facebook creates various options for online retailers to promote and sell products within the platform. One of the latest features is called “Facebook Shops”. It enables highly specific and precise targeting, conversion tracking, and gives access to multiple advertising tools.

Not far ago we published an article revealing how Facebook Shop could help ecommerce businesses to grab the audience and improve sales.

2. Instagram

The user base of Facebook’s “child” platform Instagram has grown to more than a billion users. As the chart by Statista shows, by the year 2023 the number of active US Instagram users will reach 125.5 million.

The number of those who buy through an Instagram account will increase accordingly.

Recently Instagram has launched shoppable posts providing ecommerce retailers with the ability to sell products while sharing images of them. A shoppable post includes tags that highlight the item name, price, and actionable link to the web store.

In this article we suggest 3 powerful strategies to help boost your web store sales through Instagram.

3. YouTube

YouTube can benefit ecommerce through visually-driven content, like:

  • Tutorials;
  • Product reviews;
  • Digests, charts, and tops;
  • Haul videos;
  • Unboxing videos;
  • Q&A sessions.

YouTube has gathered a huge crowd of more than 2 billion active monthly users. Today it allows you to find the target audience for products and services of virtually any market niche.

7 Easy Ways To Create Content for Social Media

After you’ve selected social media channels to promote and grow your business, you will consistently need to generate and share content. For ecommerce business owners, the process of coming up and making high-quality content for social media often comes as a challenge, especially if the web store is a new player on the market.

We’ve gathered 7 easy-to-use ways to help your brand to stand out on social media. See them below.

1. Create DIY content with templates

Do it yourself or DIY content helps establish your creativity and craft unique images. Additionally, this is one of the good ways to considerably reduce the budget on content creation.

For those with no experience in social media marketing and the creation of engaging content, we suggest starting off with tools like

They are equally often used by experts and complete newbies to SMM alike.

All the three graphic design platforms offer a huge collection of ready-to-use templates for social media post creation. They are easy-to-navigate and provide useful tutorials.

Canva, Snappa, and Adobe Spark are free to use. Certain advanced design options require payment though.

2. Find inspiring content in stock libraries

You can always find quality images and videos in stock libraries. No need to hire professional photographers.

3 of the most popular stock libraries providing extensive collections of quality images for free are

Reasonable use of stock images in your social media accounts makes a good SMM tactic for starters in ecommerce as it helps to save time and efforts on visual asset creation.

3. Try live video and maximize engagement

People would rather watch a piece of video than go through blocks of texts. Every social media platform has bagan to pay more attention to video content. It’s highly visual and gives businesses a wide variety of features to grow their brand and drive engagement.

Live videos and stories on Facebook and Instagram keep gaining popularity among merchants and customers. There’s a diverse array of content for brands to employ.

Why invest effort in video creation? The core reasons are:

  • Ability to talk to the followers through comments and questions directly;
  • No extra funds needed to create a live video.

4. Opt for user generated content, or UGC

UGC is one of the most powerful forms of social proof today, that helps make purchasing decisions. Social proof guides much of consumer purchasing behavior as we tend to ascribe correctness to what we see other people buying, whether it’s experts or the wisdom of the crowd.

Let your followers take part in content creation through submitting, tagging photos, videos, and stories featuring your brand’s products.

By reposting UGC merchants

  • Get valuable content and don’t lose time, funds, and efforts on content material designing;
  • Build loyalty and trust to their brand. Posts featuring real people and reflecting their impressions provides invaluable visibility to your products.

Using UGC makes even greater sense for those who start their SMM journey and wish to build long-lasting relationships with customers.

5. Harness influencers to cut through the noise

Cooperation with influencers is another way to create promotional content for your brand in social media.

You can either

  • Use influencer-generated content. In this case, you get the content created by influencers and featuring your brand to post in your profile.
  • Follow influencer marketing strategy. In this case, influencers post content featuring your brand on their social media channels.

The most valued benefits of this SMM tactic are:

  • Work with professional content creators, which liberates your time for other business development goals;
  • Larger audience attention, which helps you boost your brand’s reach and discoverability.

Ant type of collaboration with influencers comes with a price tag. The costs vary based on the number of followers and the quality of work.

6. Promote your brand’s hashtag and leverage sharing

To help grow brand awareness, launch a unique hashtag. By offering deals, discounts, or other valuable opportunities, you can easily encourage your followers to use it with the content they create.

Brand’s hashtag helps quickly find all the content featuring your products. This may also become a great source of material for UGC or any other SMM initiative.  

Another option that you can use to encourage people to create content is to launch a giveaway. To take part in the contest, your followers will need to share content with your brand’s hashtag.

7. Hire an agency to delegate SMM tasks

The ideas we’ve outlined work, but might require time to bring you the results. In case your time frames are tight and your budget allows you to spend more on social media marketing, you can hire an expert social media marketing agency.

An agency will help develop your SMM strategy and make all the necessary jobs, from profile creation to consistent posting and analysis of the work done.

Although it will require additional investments, working with professionals is worth it. Through delegating social media content creation to an SMM expert agency you liberate time for your brand’s development.

Conclusion

Social media presence today tends to be obligatory for businesses to succeed. To make this presence profitable, make sure to adopt a strategy driving awareness about your brand and helping to increase conversions.

The seven tips we have outlined make a good start to help turn your social media profiles into the source of new customers. They are easy to implement and sure worth a try.

Why not now?