Essential Social Media Tips for E-Commerce Websites

If you run an ecommerce website, chances are your customers – regardless of their age, gender or economic status – are active on social networks and social media sharing sites such as facebook, twitter, linkedin etc.

Below are some statistics from a major social media monitoring site Pingdom:

• 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
• 18 to 24 year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site; they’re spread out all over

Social media is impacting how we do business online in different ways. Customers are sharing more and more information about their activities online and the things they like. Getting people to share your products on social networks is a great way to bring in traffic and find new visitors to your website.

Below are some ways to improve the social media effort put into an ecommerce web site without sending away customers.

1. Get Data

You need to figure out where your site visitors are sharing your information (about your products or services). Without this information, you won’t know where to focus your social media energies.

2. Set up Facebook and Twitter profiles

You have to focus first on what social media networks make the most impact, and these two services are the best places to start.

3. Find unique places for sharing buttons

Instead of using a generic sharing widget in the same place across all your sites, try putting sharing features in prominent positions in different places in your site’s design.

4. Add product videos

People like seeing a product in action, so video is an excellent way to improve sales. Companies like Zappos have seen major increases in sales just by adding product videos.

5. Engage customers

Figure out who’s talking about your brand (or your competitors) and prepare a strategy.

6. Add exclusivity

Make a strong call-to-action for your visitors as to why they should follow your brand on Twitter, Facebook, or any other network.

7. Track what people click on social media sites

When you share links on social networks, you can track and see how many people are actually clicking these links.

8. Give back

Think of ways that you can be useful to your followers. Share news and tips that they’ll find helpful. Ask their opinions. Give them coupons. Interact with them.