There can be no doubt that social media platforms play a vital role in ensuring the success of any e-commerce business. Social media increases your SEO score, provides valuable marketing opportunities, and can be used for customer support.
If you want to know more about social media marketing for Shopify or any online store, keep reading. We’ll be discussing the top social media platforms for ecommerce.
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What Types of Social Media For Your Choice?
Social media has expanded rapidly over the years, providing ever-more exciting ways to market your business. Text, video, and photo images are tools available to you. Social media platforms all specialize in one or more of these media.
Let’s take a quick look at the most popular social media platforms for e-commerce:
- Facebook: Basically the first type of social media to be popularly accepted, Facebook has a massive footprint of approximately 2.6 billion users. You have the ability to market your products using all forms of media and a great selection of marketing and promotional tools using Facebook Business.
- Instagram: Primarily a photo-sharing platform, Instagram has gained much ground in offering online store owners numerous ways to promote and advertise their products and brands. Instagram is the largest photo-sharing social media platform, with about 1 billion active users.
- YouTube: This is the oldest and most popular video-sharing platform, with more than 2 billion users. It offers E-commerce business owners amazing opportunities to create brand awareness and promote products. YouTube also provides PPC advertising.
- Vimeo: Similar to YouTube, Vimeo offers video sharing, allowing you to post informational and promotional videos. Vimeo is more focused on business video marketing than YouTube. The emphasis is more on quality than the quantity of videos posted on the platform.
- Pinterest: This image-sharing platform is the second largest contributor of social media traffic to Shopify stores. Most users are women, making this an ideal platform for promoting fashion items, home décor, and other products that may appeal to female customers.
- TikTok: Has massive appeal, particularly with younger people, though it covers the full demographic. A recent survey of TikTok users revealed that 60% of them are more likely to buy a product if they’ve seen it on the platform. This is an interactive platform with many experimental and innovative features.
- Reddit: Probably one of the most unique social media platforms, Reddit only allows users to post and share text and image content. It is essentially a blogging social media site. Topics tend to be more serious and less focused on commercial marketing. It requires a different type of marketing approach to other platforms, in that direct marketing is not that successful, even rejected by some users. As a result, Reddit evokes more trust in products and brands that are put up for discussion and scrutinization.
- Twitter: This has become one of the most popular and influential social media platforms. It is favored by many influencers, with almost 30% of Twitter users stating that would be more likely to buy a product if they saw it on Twitter. Like most of the big social media platforms, you have access to many wonderful business and advertising tools.
How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for Your Online Store
Choosing the right social platform for an e-commerce business requires research and a good idea of what you want to achieve. Since most people have several social media accounts, it can be beneficial to spread your influence over several types of social media.
Though, with over 700 social media platforms, it isn’t as easy as it may seem to choose the best options for your business. Here are some great tips that will make your social media marketing campaign successful.
Understand Your Audience
Sometimes bigger isn’t necessarily better. Facebook may have the most users, but your business may benefit from a more niche-oriented approach. Knowing your audience demographic, interests, and preferences will help you determine which platform will have the greatest effect in engaging the appropriate potential customers.
The Right Fit for Your Brand
Many companies that focus heavily on visual presentations will prefer a platform like Instagram. Similarly, if your brand is more into the hip and trendy, you will want to use social media that is targeted at younger users.
How your company is perceived will have a lot to do with which social media platforms your choose and how you present your brand on these platforms. It is often a good idea to have different types of campaigns for the various platforms that you use.
Observe Your Competition
Performing a competitive comparison of businesses that are similar to yours can offer amazing insight into what works and what doesn’t. I’m not suggesting that you copy what your competitors are doing, but you can learn from their successes and mistakes.
Take note of which social media platforms competing stores are using. Study their marketing techniques and how they differ across the various platforms.
Consider your Marketing Objectives
There are many ways that you can use social media to your advantage. Advertising, discussion, customer support, and public awareness campaigns are but a few of the techniques used to promote products and brands on social media.
You need to discern which of these are important to you and then find the platforms with the best tools to achieve your goals.
Understand What Each Platform Has to Offer
Once you’ve established exactly what you want to achieve and how you wish to implement your social media campaign, you need to determine which social media platforms are best suited to your needs.
Research the social media platforms. Look at their primary demographic and see if it fits with your objectives. It’s important to know what marketing tools they offer, what are the costs involved, and if this will work for your business.
Know Your Limitations
While it might seem like the more-is-better approach will have the best results, you may not have the resources to successfully manage multiple social media campaigns. A small business, with only one person managing social media marketing, might not have the time to give each account the requisite attention they require.
Social media marketing is all about engagement with potential customers. If you are not able to respond to all the comments and user activities, it is better to only stick to a few social media accounts.
Conclusion
Social media marketing for Shopify has proven its worth a million times over. In order to maximize the benefits that this type of marketing has to offer, you need to understand the many options available to you and how they work.
Research the best social media platforms for your business and how your competitors are using these resources. Look for particular niches that match the type of people you are targeting for your marketing campaign. Finally, you need to ensure that you are able to manage your social medial campaign with the human resources and budget at your disposal.