Importance of Social Media Presence for Ecommerce Business in 2023

Having a presence on social media is no longer a debatable issue, but a given for all brands, no matter the business model or industry. In this article, we’ll show you six major benefits of using social media and how it can transform your ecommerce business.

The opportunities are endless, which can make opening a business profile on social media daunting. This is why we focused on the most important steps you need to take in order to reap the benefits of digital communities and being present online in this shape and form.

1. The definition of brand awareness has changed in 2023

Brand awareness is important for businesses across the board, no matter how strong their presence on the market may be. It goes beyond customers recognizing your products on the shelves. Nowadays, brand awareness means making sure that your customers identify with your brand.

People want to be reflected in the brands they consume and more importantly, they want the brands to align themselves with their values and beliefs. The time of brands being apolitical and silent on social issues is behind us and this is where social media shines.

It allows brands and their audience to communicate directly, in real-time, without third-party involvement. Brands no longer sell products, they sell lifestyles, and the people that have those lifestyles or aspire to them, want brands to use their influence and speak up when an injustice is brought to light.

Social media helps brands craft their stories and give a new level to storytelling. Brands can show all the behind-the-scenes processes and explain how they acquire materials, test services, and give back to their communities. Opening up about the processes that your audiences weren’t privy to before has become the new norm.

Seeing how brand awareness entails a lengthy and consistent process, social media is a great platform for building awareness with your audience. Post about your products and services on multiple channels and reach a wider audience all while building on your previous posts, shaping a narrative about your brand.

For an even greater impact, you can try your hand at influencer marketing. Influencers can help you reach different audiences, who aren’t necessarily wide but more narrowed in around your industry and type of products, which is a big win for any brand.

2. Low investments can get you a quick increase in revenue

Billboards, TV commercials and PR articles are still very expensive, all while not providing you with any type of feedback on how many people saw or interacted with your ad. Furthermore, with those types of ads, you don’t get to pick and choose who sees them, so there is no way to zero in on your potential customers.

These are the core advantages of social media advertising, but the biggest advantage may be the low cost of doing it on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With ads allowing you to target people based on their location, age, education, interests, lifestyle, shopping habits and even the device they use to access social media, this type of advertising has quickly become the marketers’ favourite.

When a campaign comes to an end, you can analyze it and see who engaged with it the most and customize your buyer persona based on those results. Monitoring Facebook ad comments can give you an insight into what objections users have about your products while a timely response to them can save your brand’s face and spark engagement.

Moving away from native ads, social media also has integrated stores where you can sell your products directly. With Instagram checkout and Facebook shop, you can list products for sale, sell them directly and manage your shipping.

The whole process makes it easy for people to discover your brand and complete purchases, all on one platform. That is a huge advantage of social media stores since you’re going to your clients, instead of them having to go to you.

During the pandemic, the global social commerce market estimated an increase at a rate of 31,4%, and we believe it will only continue to grow. A great tip is to personalize the experience by using custom fonts, colours, and chatbots.

Make the experience easy and simple and include frequently asked questions about your products, payment services, and shipment in your product descriptions.

3. Customer service your customers won’t hate

Social media has revolutionized customer service since it gave customers a direct line of communication with brands, as well as a platform for them to air their grievances publicly, knowing it will get them results quicker.

Using sentiment analysis, you can investigate the attitude towards your brand on social media. By gathering the mentions of your business online and looking at drops in sentiment, you can quickly respond to any possible crises.

Seeing how people expect brands’ social media to function as a platform for customer service, you have to make sure to provide them with a positive experience. Make sure to answer their questions in a timely manner, which can be helped by using automation tools.

If you get the same type of questions a lot, include the answer to them in your automated responses. You can even go a step further, and create a FAQ page that answers all inquiries in detail.

Aside from speed, the second most important thing is the end result. Make sure your customer support team has access to your social media so that they can provide your audience with real answers, instead of your social media team referring them to a phone number, or an email address.

Your customer support on social media doesn’t stop at private messages. You should also answer all your public mentions – the positive and negative ones. This practice may seem tedious, but research shows that when companies engage and respond to their audience on social media, that translates into customers spending 20% to 40% more with the company.

Since quality customer support has such a great impact on your audience, it’s only natural that you should invest in this department and coach them on how to best handle different situations they may encounter.

The last piece of advice is to bring your personality into it. Don’t be afraid to stray from the usual cookie-cutter responses and add a bit of warmth to your communication with the audience.

4. Bring traffic and boost conversion on your website

No doubt, each business owner aims to get the maximum traffic on their website. Luckily, you can leverage the power of social media to drive traffic conversion to your ecommerce website and increase your reach and visibility among your target audience.

When you are posing on your social media sites, you are inserting a link for your site with the main keyword and this helps to send traffic to your site as leads and visitors will find your site through social media.

Also, customers are more likely to believe the actions of others when making a buying decision. If they don’t have the trust, neither they will visit your site nor read your content. So, to build trust you can go for social proof and user-generated content to show your online shoppers that you are someone they can trust and have confidence in.

Here social media can serve as a source of social proof, with customer reviews and testimonials appearing on your business profiles. This can boost the perceived trustworthiness of your brand and influence prospects to make a purchase.

Even on your social media platforms you can run a social media contest and encourage your social media followers to share their experiences with your products. And this way you can utilise social media to boost your traffic and conversion rates.

Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are known as effective for product discovery, with customers using these platforms to discover new products and gather inspiration. By having a strong presence on these platforms, you can increase the likelihood of customers discovering and making a purchase from your ecommerce store. Even by running targeted ads based on demographics, interests and behaviours, you can provide targeted promotion and increase traffic and conversions.

So, to drive traffic from social media to the ecommerce site, build an active social media presence. But before you plug in and post online you must understand how each social media channel works to choose the right channel and optimise your content accordingly.

5. Give a boost to your SEO effort

SEO is one key element of successful ecommerce web development and the link between SEO and social media is significant. Even if social media is not an element of SEO ranking, it correlates with the factors that impact search rankings.

Social media influence SEO in many ways, such as it:

• Distributes content and create link opportunities.
• Maximise the lifespan of a post.
• Boost organic traffic.
• Increase online visibility and brand awareness.

When it comes to increasing the reach of your content and reaching a larger audience, social media works as a reliable approach. As you are continuously posting informative content throughout your social networks by linking your social media profiles, it becomes a powerful source of new visitors. Because the more you publish useful content across social media, the more the audiences will likely share those content with their friends and followers.

And as the sharing continues, it gradually strengthens the factors Google considers when ranking a website by indicating the fact that your posts are useful to your target market. Because Google pays attention to your online engagement and how people talk about you in customer reviews and online mentions.

For example, Gridlock coffee roasters publish informative content on various topics in their news section. When they share those content on social media profiles, audiences who are coffee enthusiasts can amplify those by sharing it further to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or email.

This results in an increase in visibility, traffic and backlinks. And all these signals notify search engines about the credibility of their content and that comes with the improvement of search rankings. So, as a result, users find the site organically through search engines.

6. You can learn more about your competition

Alongside generating leads and improving your customer service you can analyse the social media performance of your brand as well as your competitors. Because when you think from a long-term perspective, a competitor analysis is inevitable when you want to grow your ecommerce business.

So, to be ahead of them, you can conduct social media analysis of your opposing brand and identify key areas for development. By monitoring your competitors’ social media activity, you can gain insights into their promotions, product launches, marketing campaigns and other activities. This will help you to get a better overview of the presence of your brand on your particular ecommerce marketplace.

For example, you can start by taking a look at the social media audience number of your competitors and analysing whether they have a bigger audience than you. Also, monitor each of their social media profiles and dig deeper into their behaviour on various social networks.

This will help you point out on which network your competitors are putting more focus. Suppose, if you find that your competitors are really successful on Facebook, you can also focus more on this network to get new leads for your product.

Even by monitoring competitor customer feedback, you can get valuable insights into their strengths and weaknesses which will help you understand what customers are saying about your competitors and what they looking for in your market.

Overall, it will help you to gain a competitive advantage and make an informed decision about your ecommerce business strategy.

Conclusion

Social media opened up a lot of possibilities for brands to connect with their audience and it would be a shame to waste them. Seeing how a large number of people already use those platforms, it is only natural that you would post content there and promote your brand.

Creating a loyal fan base, spreading awareness about your brand and increasing revenue are all attainable goals social media can help you achieve.