1. Be Visible on Your Market’s Favorite Social Networking Sites
The social sharing tool “AddThis” lists approximately 300 social media websites. That’s far too many for you to tackle! AddThis highlights the top dozen in bold.
To narrow it down, try surveying your customers. Just email them a short social media survey, and also put it on your website. If you get enough participation, this will provide invaluable data. You may need to offer an incentive to make it worth their while. Quite often drawings for a tangible, single prize that everyone wants works best.
If you are already doing social media, take a close look at your user statistics. Demographic information and interaction stats will tell you more about your market and how active they are on that platform. The statistics can help you decide which sites may be worth spending more time on.
What is being said on social media sites about your keywords, your company/brand, or your competitors? It’s impossible to track this all yourself, so get a couple of tools. Try Googling “social media monitoring tools.” I have found that Radian6 is expensive but can pay off for medium-sized and larger businesses that need to keep a close watch.
2. Make Social Media Users Feel Special
You have to provide incentives for customers to connect with you through social media. Create exclusive offers, contests and coupons that are ONLY available on your chosen channels. You can do this at random or on a weekly basis. To run Facebook contest you can use a service that allows for easy data gathering and custom forms that would be virtually impossible to make on your own. You can run a “liker” contest which enters all new page likers into a drawing, or host a photo caption contest.
3. Keep a Close Eye on Your Competitors
Imitation is the highest form of flattery. It is also how many businesses exceed what their competitors are doing. Choose half a dozen of your direct competitors and hire an expert to produce a monthly report that includes:
- which sites they are actively using
- how popular these accounts are (# of likers or followers) and how much interaction they get
- what kind of content they put up, when, and how often
- campaigns they run
- where they might be getting their content
Take a look at this report for ideas about how you can improve your social media. Obviously, choose the strategies that seem to be working, and disregard what is not working!
4. Connect. Don’t Push.
Marketing has changed. Consumers are savvy and not interested in getting advertised at anymore. You can’t just sell products. You need to engage. You need to be sincere. Throw away your ads and focus on what your market wants. Remember the movie “What Women Want?” Watch that, and adapt it for social media. What are they thinking? What do they WANT? If you can’t figure it out, research and find out.
Ask questions, conduct polls, write fascinating blog posts (which will be propagated on your social media sites), and post lots of great pictures with captions. Measure the results in your stats and sales reports.
Be smart about your social media strategy for your ecommerce business. At Shero Designs, we offer expert social media consulting and services. Contact us for details.
Source: Pingdom Report: Social Network Demographics in 2012
Best,
Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.
