The retail landscape seems to be ever-changing, but it’s been completely revamped in the last few years. Social media has become a key part of any business’s marketing …
“53% of businesses use social advertising.” - Hootsuite
… and e-commerce has become a sizable piece of the retail pie …
“In 2019, e-commerce sales accounted for 14.1 percent of all retail sales worldwide.” - Statista
So, it’s only natural that social media and e-commerce have become entwined.
What is social shopping?
Due to the current retail landscape, social media has evolved to become shoppable much like any other smart e-commerce website. Popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest all have robust options for businesses looking to sell products online. And, the best part of social selling is that it’s user-friendly. Shoppers only need to make a few clicks from their social media feed to checkout.
Types of Social Shopping
There are so many kinds of social selling, so we’ll keep it high-level. Here are two key methods with which you can sell your products on social media.
Paid Shop ads: When you put dollars behind a social media post, you have the ability to make your posts super clickable for users. The example below, from Facebook, includes a “Shop Now” button that takes the user to a website to shop.
Image via Marketing Week
Is social shopping right for my small business?
Social shopping might be right for your business if you fit any of the following criteria:
You have money for paid social media advertising. Organic social media only goes so far, often reaching only a small portion of your current (organic) follower base. You’ll need to invest regular dollars into delivering your social shopping ads to the right target audiences at the right times.
Your product is visual. Social media is visual, and products that translate well through imagery and video are a natural fit for social media. If you don’t have great images, it might be time to invest in professional photography.
You have the resources to invest in maintenance. Social selling isn’t a one-and-done strategy. It takes time and resources to create and continually optimize ads and field conversations and questions through social platforms. Consider whether you’ll have someone to handle the day-to-day work.
How to Get Started With Social Shopping
Want to take on social shopping for your small business? Here’s a quick-start checklist.
Decide which platforms are right for you. When choosing platforms from which to tackle social selling for your small business, it’s better to choose quality over quantity. Consider your target audience’s basic demographics and match up your target customer with key social media demographic information. This guide from Sprout Social is a great place to start, as it provides insights such as, Facebook is 75% female and 73% urban.
Set up and optimize your platforms. Once you know which platforms are right for you, it’s time to sign up and/or optimize your own. Social selling ads will need to be run from fully-branded and optimized social accounts. Make sure to use relevant imagery and product-specific content on your profiles so they’re easily searchable within each platform.
Searchability is essential for many reasons, but for illustration’s sake, let’s say a consumer sees your ad, navigates away to another post, and forgets about you for a bit. Then, the next day, they see something that jogs their memory and they decide it’s time to buy from you. But, how do they find you? They’ll likely look for you on that same social media platform, so it’s essential that you’re easily found.
Create content for social selling. Next, you’ll need to write content and create imagery for posting on your social media channels for social selling. Use bold, memorable images and succinct, informative copy.
Post content, optimize, repeat. Now that you have content to post, it’s time to measure performance of different products, platforms, and ads. Perhaps one of your products performs better on Pinterest than Facebook, or one Snapchat ad greatly outpaces the rest. Take these kinds of insights into account and edit your strategy accordingly.
Don’t have the time to deal with this, but intrigued by the concept? Social selling is complicated, but the Madison Marketing Hound team knows how to make the biggest bang for your small business’s buck on social media. Get in touch with us today if you would like some help!