With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping many people at home, many brick-and-mortar businesses have pivoted to setting up e-commerce stores and promoting their wares on social media. In fact, COVID-19 may have accelerated e-commerce sales growth by as much as two years, according to media and research organization Digital Commerce 360. How can your own e-commerce brand make a name for itself in the crowded playing field of social media? Here are 5 tips.
While you may be most focused on creating beautiful graphics for your posts, don’t skip over their captions! Captions are an awesome opportunity for you to inject some of your brand personality into your posts and encourage user engagement. And the more users engage with your posts, the more likely that the social media algorithms will show them to more users, increasing your posts’ reach.
Need inspiration for your captions?
Well, we love the captions on the Instagram posts for artisan ice-cream retailer Jeni’s Splendid Ice-Creams. Although the captions are generally short, they’re cleverly written to catch attention. And they do. Just take a look at the caption for this post, for example:
Would we like to have “an ice-cream worthy of a once-in-a-year celebration, made to enjoy any day we please?”
Mmmm, yes. Where can we order a pint?
If you check out the social media accounts of some e-commerce brands, you’ll notice that they don’t have a consistent post-design theme. As a result, their posts can look rather haphazard and lacking in brand consistency. So if you pick a design theme for your posts that matches your branding—and follow it—you’ll be miles ahead of the competition.
One e-commerce brand doing a great job of sticking to a visually appealing design theme is butter tart retailer BoTART. With the business’s consistent use of bright colors and attention-grabbing motifs, its posts are sure to catch your eye and put a smile on your face. You may even be convinced to order a container of tarts or two!
That said, don’t worry if you aren’t a graphic design expert or aren’t comfortable with your ability to create well-themed post designs. Graphic design platforms such as PosterMyWall offer sleek social media templates that you can easily customize in a user-friendly interface. Just pick your favorite template to get started.
Here’s another thing you need to keep consistent if you want your e-commerce brand to have a successful social media presence: your posting frequency. No matter how fantastic your social media content is, you can’t expect to get many views or “likes” for them if you post irregularly—or if you hardly post at all! To this end, it’s a good idea to create a social media content calendar for planning and scheduling your posts in advance. This calendar will help guide your content creation and publishing efforts, and you can always push back your planned posts if something absolutely post-worthy crops up.
While you can plan your posts using Google Calendar or even a hardcopy calendar, tools such as HootSuite and Buffer make social media content scheduling easy and are worth a look. Apart from fixing your posting days, you may even want to experiment with the best posting times for maximum user engagement.
As an e-commerce brand owner, you may be hard at work growing your community—your audience of loyal fans and customers who love what you offer. But as you work on getting your social media follower counts up, don’t forget to engage with your community! This is an easy strategy for boosting user engagement and building brand loyalty that many brands neglect and can be as simple as replying to their comments on your posts. Because as you do so, you’re acknowledging their presence in your community. Your followers may then be encouraged to engage with your posts even more! It definitely beats being a faceless business that engages in only one-way communication with its audience.
Creative tools store Not Just Colour has a unique approach to engaging with its community. Apart from replying to comments using the Not Just Colour handle, the store founders sometimes reply using their own Instagram accounts.
This helps further put a face to the people behind the business!
You aren’t the only one working to grow your social media following. All around you, many others are doing the same thing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re your competitors on social media, however. If there’s a good fit between what you and another business are doing, why not partner up for collaboration instead?
Collaborations can also be a whole lot of fun. In collaboration with talk-show host Jimmy Fallon, prescription glasses e-retailer Warby Parker released a pair of spinnable sunglasses called “Spinnies.” And to promote the Spinnies, Warby Parker posted a humorous video of Jimmy Fallon crashing into the ceiling after spinning his pair of Spinnies:
The video was viewed close to 27,000 times, with many users also expressing their interest in buying the Spinnies in the comments.
Setting up social media accounts for your e-commerce brand is easy, but growing them into popular accounts with substantial and active followings is not. Use the above tips to differentiate yourself from the competition and generate appealing content to bring in more exposure, traffic, and revenue for your e-commerce store. Good luck!