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Social media marketing ideas for Shopify brands
When it comes to marketing for eCommerce brands, social media activities seem to be valuable for an increasingly competitive industry like online retail.
Marketing on social media offers an effective way to grow brand awareness and bring qualified traffic to your website. The method includes activities such as posting content in form of text, image updates, videos, or other types to drive audience engagement.
The top social media networks include:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Instagram
- Snapchat
- LinkedIn
- TikTok
- Pinterest
- Youtube
A successful social media marketing strategy must begin with a clear goal. There are several questions to ask in order to define your social media’s targets:
What do you aim to achieve when choosing social platforms as marketing channels?
Who is your target audience?
How does your target audience use social media?
Your target audience and your marketing aim play important roles in choosing the proper social channels.
For example, Facebook is the most popular one and can suit just about any business with a massive audience reach. Facebook’s users are mostly between the ages of 18-34, with 56% male and 44% female. About 96% of its users visit the platform using their mobile devices.
This is the perfect platform to promote content from external sources, or to share guides with your readers. And Facebook’s algorithm loves video too, don’t forget it!
LinkedIn, on the other hand, seems to match B2B businesses whose goal is to reach audiences with a professional image. It is ideal for sharing any changes you are making in your business to adapt to a current trend, or to provide unique industry insights.
Furthermore, the brand's industry will definitely inform and drive your social media strategy. For example, most eCommerce businesses have a strong visual presence, which makes Instagram a powerful channel to share their images with potential customers.
In order to help get your Shopify website one hell of a social media strategy, there are some promising practices below:
Influencers are those that share their posts on social media to attract their followers’ attention in the form of engagement (like, share, comment). Influencers are those who get a high reputation on a specific market, and people tend to trust their friends, relatives and people they admire more than the selling company. Having an influencer to be your brand ambassador, you would get a higher chance to approach potential customers.
"Influencers are an essential part of the current media landscape and as the country opens back up, the demand will likely only be greater," said Ryan Detert, CEO of Influential.
Depending on your market characteristics you should pick out which kind of ambassadors you want to collaborate with. Initially, you should answer the following questions:
Where does your customer hang out?
What is your goal?
Where could your product be best illustrated?
What is your budget?
On the other hand, to choose the right voices for your brand, keep your eyes on someone your industry listens to. Once you narrow down your list to the most potential influencers, you'll want to reach out to them.
Measuring the partnership is another important step. The collaboration format can be with a fixed upfront payment or commission on each successful referral, either way, it is important to have a tracking tool in order to be informed how many conversions the ambassadors bring to your business (clicks, sales). With UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing, you will be able to build a professional relationship with influencers while having all the data tracked accurately.
User-generated content (UGC) is any type of content: text, videos, images, reviews,... created by people, instead of the brands. On social channels, users share posts featuring a brand, exposing the products or services, the brand then can share that content with their own audience, which helps to boost credibility.
It is reported by Stakla ( a famous visual content engine) about Consumer & Marketing Perspectives on Content in the Digital Age”, Consumers are 2.4x more likely to say user-generated content is most authentic compared to branded content.
In addition to improve the brand authenticity, it also creates trust (92% of consumers trust the recommendations from their friend, while 70% trust online buyer opinions) and drives the purchasing decision
There are some best practices to share the user-generated content from your fan. First of all, it’s essential to ask for permission, you can search for a brand hashtag to see who mentions you. However, re-sharing that content without permission from the owner is a surefire way to kill goodwill and annoy some of your best brand advocates. Plus, it is recommended to tag the original creator directly in your post. Providing owner credit shows that brands recognize the work of content creators, and helps make sure that person stays excited about using and posting about your brand.
Free stuff appeals to everyone! Contest or giveaway could be a wonderful way to urge your followers to engage with your social accounts, thus, increase the brand presence to more audiences.
The basic giveaway would start by offering something that is extremely attractive for your fan base, make sure it shows real value. Next, a few steps are required to get the gift such as like/follow the fan page, tag friend(s), comment,..., all of which will definitely boost the engagement.
Running a contest on social channels is super easy, it could be whether a photo contest, an essay contest or Sweepstakes,... the ideas for a competition is endless.
A cool contest idea for Shopify brands can be seen from Mad Millie as below:
Stories were first released by Snapchat. Recently, Youtube’s Reels and Facebook Stories became the latest in the list that also includes Instagram Stories and Twitter Moments (in a way)
Stories seem to be one of the most trending social media storytelling formats that allow users to create photo and video collections which can be viewed before disappearing after 24 hours.
Each platform updates the Stories feature constantly which helps brands to communicate with their audience in a new, interesting way.
For example, Instagram users can create a story using text, boomerang, layout with multiple images, superzoom video, Photobooth,...you can also tag a location, add a song or use stickers in your story.
The creativeness is endless to create unique and interesting stories to get people impressed with your brand.
When building your content on social channels, you can’t expect much when you only post random links, @mention a few folks and call it a day. Your strategy must include consistency and communicativeness.
If there’s a common thread among the biggest brands on social, it’s that they post on a consistent basis. Creating a fixed schedule for your content publishing is important because it keeps your social media presence organized while maximizing your contents reach as well.
It’s recommended for Shopify brands to try an auto-post tool like Facebook & Twitter Auto Post to save your time on manually posting your products. The app can either the following options:
- Auto-post your latest products and discounts on social media to keep your audience engaged.
- Random publishing products from selected collections to social media automatically.
- Auto-post customer reviews on your website to social media to get customer trust and grow sales
Not only is it important to keep your fan page constantly updated, showing up when your audience reaches your brand is also a key. Show them that your brand is ready to talk whenever someone needs assistance. Get someone to be in charge of your accounts’ inboxes and reply in time.
Many Shopify businesses also integrate their eCommerce stores with multiple Facebook pages and accounts using Live Chat, Chatbot, Messenger+ by Socialhead. It helps to boost your sales and support your customers better through live chat.
In conclusion, Social media platforms are always evolving, it is important to keep yourself updated with social media trends and try testing the marketing ideas to find out the effective one.