Ignoring the importance of social media is one of the most common and serious mistakes any Magento marketer can make. In addition to visibility, generating leads is the single best reason why you should take your social media platforms very, very seriously. The math here is very simple: the wider your reach, the more leads you will get.
But how do you expand your reach, your influence and your followers? Here are some tips that might help you with that.
Research Your Customers’ Social Media Habits
You want to have a strong presence on those platforms where the largest part of your customers spends their time. Millennials are on Snapchat and Instagram, older crowd prefers Facebook, everyone likes Twitter, and so on. Depending on what you’re selling, you probably have a more or less clearly identified target crowd you need to focus on.
So, before you start your social media offensive, you first need to pick your battlegrounds and then proceed accordingly. It goes without saying, of course, that you probably need to be present and very active on all social media platforms. A company that doesn’t have a Facebook page is virtually invisible these days, even though you might decide to focus most of your efforts on, say, Instagram or even LinkedIn.
How do you learn where your customers are? Ask them! Also, look at where your main competitors are, find out where your particular industry is most active and perhaps even throw out anonymous survey. You can also track visits to your site with Google Analytics and see how many are coming from which social media site.
Set Your Goals
Depending on the size of your business, you will need a more or less extensive social media marketing strategy. This is a topic that deserves an article of its own, but what we want to stress at this point is that it is vital for you to set some basic goals that you want to use as benchmarks.
Some of the things you might want to decide to measure include number of fans and followers, traffic you want to get from social media to your website, conversion rate, type of posts (and their number) compared to the engagement and audience growth to engagement to sales ratio.
Interaction, Interaction, Interaction
No user will ever be interested in checking out your store or returning to it if they don’t feel like they have your attention. Your fans and followers would love to hear from you, personally, as it makes them feel like they’re dealing with a real person, not some faceless corporation.
We strongly recommend commenting, answering to comments and posts, even DMs, and especially when someone @s (mentions) you in a post or in a comment. Also, be active and share content that is both engaging and relevant to your product or service, or at least to your general industry. Finally, set some time aside to identify influencers among your followers and then pay special attention to interactions with them.
Share, Don’t Sell
Obviously your final goal is to sell but before you get to that point, you need to engage your customers through social media and to build a loyal customer and fan base. Regardless of the platform, your social media presence needs to be extremely active and it should be based on quality content that aims at building trust.
Try sharing useful information, tips, anything you feel might be of interest to your followers. Don’t try to persuade them into buying your stuff right away, especially since most users don’t visit the social media pages of companies they follow with an explicit intent to buy anything from them. Of course, you still want some portion of your content to contain promotions of your product, but try to keep it around 20% or 30%.
Optimize Your Page
One of the most important tools in page optimization (and remember, we’re talking about social media platforms here) are keywords. If you don’t know what your keywords are yet, you better get on it ASAP, as this tool is essential in the conversion rate optimization of your Magento site, not just your social media pages. Sit down and make a list of keywords and then do your best to implement them wisely in your social media content (i.e. in your posts), preferably with hashtags.
Promote Your Pages
You need to make it really easy for people to find you wherever you are present online. Your social media pages have to be quickly and easily reachable, so make sure to add buttons and links to all of your pages on your website, on your business cards, promotional materials and, of course, email signatures. And vice versa – add a link to your online store to all your social media pages, allowing new users to visit your site, see your product and read your user reviews.
Offer Goodies
Promotions, quizzes, games and special offers do wonders not just for customer retention but for getting new customers as well. This part of the job is best done on social media. For instance, you can do a sweepstakes or a contest where people enter by following or liking your page, inviting their friends to like it or tagging your page in their post. This sort of engagement has been proven to generate more interaction with the brand, which means better conversion rates and, ultimately, more revenue.
