Social media moves so fast, it wouldn’t be a surprise if many online retailers have forgotten the Facebook and Instagram outage from a few weeks ago. For those who need a refresher, both platforms were malfunctioning for a full day, and some sellers estimate they lost up to $10,000 in revenue. The outages were a reality check for e-tailers who use Facebook and Instagram exclusively to advertise and sell their products. For everyone else, it proved the need for online retailers to diversify their ecommerce social media strategy.
There are several social media channels, and each has its own set of advantages for anyone that’s selling online. Now is the perfect time to explore previously unfamiliar platforms and cast a wider net in the social space.
Read on to learn why your online store should invest in multiple social media channels.
Reach More Consumers (for Free!)
The main draws for social media are cost and exposure, meaning that brands can reach up to 3.1 billion people for free. Every major social media site is free to join, and from there, you can upgrade (again, for free) to a business account that gives you analytics to track the performance of your posts.
Social media ties especially well into ecommerce, driving more than $30 billion in online sales annually. The various social channels are also discovery hubs, with SmartInsights reporting that 28% of web users are researching brands and finding new products to buy. There are also platforms with built-in commerce functions, so users don’t have to leave the app to make a purchase.
At the end of the day, the more consumers you can reach as a business, the more prospective customers you can bring into your sales funnel. They’re already out there; you just have to go meet them!
Avoid Dependency on One Channel
As discussed above, reliance upon one or two marketing channels can prove disastrous if there’s ever an issue with the platforms. But with a diverse presence online, your store will continue to generate sales, even if there are issues with one platform.
This applies to any social media site, as well as other forms of marketing. If your online store’s email marketing provider made major changes, for example, that could impact your ability to reach your customers. Similarly, digital marketers and SEO’s are affected when Google makes an algorithm change that significantly changes search results.
It’s evident that spreading out across marketing channels will minimize the impact of any channel’s changes or temporary failure, and an easy way to ease in is to use multiple social media platforms.
Use Different Voices
Part of the fun of social media is to use the appropriate networks to be informal and humanize your business. People would rather buy from other people than a faceless corporation, so many brands have taken the opportunity to share candid content. The Stories feature, available on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, is a good place to start because the content shared disappears after 24 hours.
Informal tones extend beyond the Stories, especially on Twitter. Most notably, fast food brands have transformed their Twitter presences and act as snarky, humorous personas that often interact with both competitor brands and average users.
By only using one social media platform, you’re missing out on the chance to showcase a different side of your brand. You might also be alienating different demographics by sticking to one voice. Millennials and Gen Z stay away from overly robotic tones, while Boomers and older generations don’t often embrace slang. Actively posting across multiple social channels allows you to speak formally on LinkedIn but then make jokes on Tumblr. Both are practices that are welcomed.
Split Ad Tests Across Channels
Running split tests, also known as A/B tests, is one of our top ecommerce social media strategies. It’s the process of slowly optimizing an advertisement by testing its different elements against a control to determine what has the best response. Eventually the tests reveal a set of ad elements that you can use going forward for the highest conversions.
As kitchen and homeware e-tailer YuppieChef found when running a split test on their homepage, the navigation bar, thought to be vitally important, only distracted consumers and did not result in as many clicks.
Online sellers that are using multiple social channels have the edge because they can run many A/B tests at once across platforms.
See More Data
More marketing campaigns automatically means more data gathered. It’s simple. A diverse ecommerce social media strategy uses the analytics from the various channels to supplement data gathered elsewhere. E-tailers can then get a better snapshot of how to move forward with their marketing efforts and make smarter business decisions.
At ReadyCloud CRM, we know that data is everything. It helps you make your next moves and gives you an objective look at your online store’s performance. That’s why we advocate for cross-channel selling as well as cross-channel social media marketing.
Marketing on a variety of social media channels doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Social media is a low-cost, low-risk place to start, and diversifying across channels is the first step to reaching a worldwide web of current and prospective customers. There are even several ecommerce social media tools that will streamline your workflow and let you concentrate on the business side of your online store. So what are you waiting for? Your next big marketing move is just a few clicks away!