No matter your age, lifestyle or career choices, chances are that you have a public profile on one of the popular social media platforms. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (to name a few) have effectively become communication and networking channels for both B2C and B2B. According to Smart Insights, around 49% of total internet users actively use social media. In addition, age groups 16-24 (50%) and 25-34 (46%) actively use social media to research products online before deciding to purchase them.

However, according to Impact BND, 60% of people no longer trust social media the way they used to due to information authenticity and data concerns. Regardless, 77% of people did say that they are likely to purchase goods from brands whose pages they actively followed for extended periods. While not impossible, building trust on social media for your eCommerce small business takes time and a strategic approach to content marketing. This is why writing a unique, appealing social media marketing strategy for eCommerce matters for long-term global success. With that, let’s take a look at what makes social media writing so well-suited for boosting your eCommerce platform’s brand awareness going further into 2020.

Advantages of Social Media for eCommerce

Before we get into social media writing for eCommerce in greater detail, let’s discuss its benefits for your brand as a whole. As we are aware, billions of people use social media daily in order to interact with friends and family, making eCommerce advertisement a logical conclusion. Let’s look at statistics relevant to our discussion, according to Business 2 Community and their published data:

• 90% of Instagram users follow a business they trust on the platform, many of which are eCommerce brands
• 79% of Twitter users actively seek new pages and businesses to follow, making it a great channel for discovery
• 58% of US customers said they would be interested in new brands after seeing them in Facebook Stories
• 13% of social media users said that direct purchase links in social media posts would increase the likelihood of buying items via social media platforms

Social media is beneficial regardless of whether you have an established platform, or are looking for ways to launch your storefront with a running start. Samantha Edwards, Content Writing Specialist at Top Essay Writing, spoke recently: “When promoting your goods and services, it’s best to go where the customers are. Creating dedicated social media pages in your brand’s name and sharing sales-oriented content to a global audience will undoubtedly bear fruit shortly thereafter. Neglecting to establish a social media presence in today’s interconnected climate is a death sentence for any business, whether brick-and-mortar, eCommerce or fully digital.”

If we were to break down the concrete benefits of using social media writing to promote your eCommerce brand, the list would contain the following:

• Low cost, effective way of communicating with your entire customer/follower base
• Building trust, brand positioning and industry authority with customers and B2B stakeholders
• Higher website engagement and sales conversion, leading to higher ROI
• Data gathering, survey, interview, and social proof opportunities

Writing a Winning Social Media Campaign for eCommerce

Set up Goals & Milestones

Once you decide to invest time and resources into social media writing for your eCommerce brand, you should do so with a plan in mind. Specifically, what do you hope to accomplish by launching a social media campaign? Some of the goals you can have in mind while writing and publishing social media content include:

• Visitors to your website from social media platforms
• Social media page followers on different platforms
• Posts published on different platforms in a certain amount of time
• Ratio between page followers and website customers

The goals you set up should be numeric, time-limited and attainable, forgoing those goals which are vague and unclear in their purpose. Using goal-setting methodologies such as SMART will give you ample opportunity to ideate and create goals which will suit your social media writing strategy efficiently.

Balance your Content Types

Social media platforms are unique in the way they treat different content types when it comes to marketing. You should retrofit content to suit different platforms instead of publishing the same posts everywhere without additional editing.

For example, Twitter emphasizes short, informative, and written content, while Instagram places great value in visuals. Similarly, Facebook enables you to mix a bit of everything to keep things interesting for your page’s followers. Writing tools such as Supreme Dissertations, Evernote, Classy Essay, and Hemingway Editor, in addition to Grab My Essay and Readable, can help your content tremendously. Use the strengths and features of each social media platform to your advantage and the campaigns you run will always turn up winning results.

Emphasize your Calls to Action

The secret to social media content engagement lies in the effective use of calls to action (CTA). Calls to action are a tried-and-tested marketing strategy which places the agency in the users’ hands. CTA can energize and animate your social media posts in order to spark interactivity and conversation with your eCommerce brand’s followers.

Posts with lines such as “What do you guys think about this?” or “Give us your thoughts on this” can do wonders for your engagement. Don’t simply link outside sources, blog posts or eCommerce storefront hyperlinks to your social media pages and call it a day. Reach out to your followers, start a conversation and let them engage your social media writing through careful use of CTA.

Gather & Publish Social Proof

We’ve touched on social proof in previous paragraphs – but what does it mean in practice? Social proof content serves to “prove” your business’ legitimacy and solidify trust in your services to future customers. Content such as user reviews, customer testimonials, interviews with satisfied buyers and similar social media writing (and multimedia) can serve as social proof.

To make matters more interesting, you can have the customers in question comment and share your social proof with their social circles. This would make certain individuals your brand ambassadors, allowing you to reach customers which would otherwise have no knowledge of your eCommerce brand.  This type of content can easily be used to boost your eCommerce brand’s position, engagement and subsequent revenue via social media.

Live Events & Interaction

A great benefit of social media platforms lies in their live streaming functionality. Whether through Instagram or Facebook, you can arrange for live events with Q&A, chat with industry representatives, satisfied customers or simply announce new product lineups.

Live social media events put a “face to the brand” and allow for much better trust and relationship building with the customer base. While not strictly social media writing, live events should find their way into your social media campaign as a way of interacting with followers directly. Your existing customers will appreciate the initiative while cold leads might be incentivized to check out your storefront and consider making a purchase.

Implement Trending Hashtags

Lastly, making your social media posts go viral should be a high priority. Whether on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you should use every tool at your disposal to signal your brand’s presence to potential customers. Hashtags can thus be used to further improve your content’s reach beyond the users who explicitly follow your eCommerce brand.

Depending on the niche you operate in, as well as your product lineup and post type, different hashtags can do wonders for your engagement rates. Hashtags allow users to find relevant content even though they may not be aware of the brand behind their publishing (as of that moment). Make sure to discover trending hashtags before you publish new posts on your social media pages to take full advantage of their publicity boost.

A Long-Term Investment

Building and maintaining social media presence for your eCommerce brand is not a one-and-done deal. Instead, you should create thematic campaigns which will revolve around different sales, events and content types to keep things fresh and worthwhile for your followers. Give yourself some time to explore different social media writing styles and approaches to content creation – Rome wasn’t built in a day. Before you know it, you will have settled for a social media marketing pipeline which reflects your brand values and customer expectations in equal parts.

Guest Author: Helene Cue is a professional content creator, editor and contributor to Trust My Paper writing service. Her career portfolio consists of research and writing about trending digital marketing topics through practical articles, case studies, and best essays. In her spare time, Helene enjoys sifting through used books stores and listening to jazz tunes.

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