October 26, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Social media is now becoming vital to the strategy of almost every ecommerce website as many can easily use these free mediums to grow traffic and increase sales. While some ecommerce sites are very savvy and have been working with social media for years, some companies are new to the game and might need some helpful hints. Time is precious when you run an ecommerce store, so you do not want to waste any of it with social media that will not give you much of a return on investment. Below we have complied some tips and guidelines on how to better use social media in your ecommerce strategy.
Not only are businesses using social media, but so is almost everyone in the United States with some sort of Internet access. Each person may belong to one or many networks like Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace. Depending on your brand you will find that different social networks work better for you than others. You might also find that there are niche social media channels that work just for your segment of ecommerce. So do your research to find out which social media channels are best for you and your ecommerce store.
Engage the social media channels and the people that use them everyday. This is not a medium to shamelessly talk about your ecommerce business and the sale of the day or the week. It is not that people do not want to know if there is a special or sale, but you also need to share useful information and build bonds with the community. You do not have to share everything you find or think would be helpful as you want to attract a relevant audience with information that would benefit them and cause them to want to learn more about you and your ecommerce store.
Keep experimenting until you find the right mix of social media that works best for you. It might be that you spend an hour a day because it is driving you a lot of traffic or sales. However, you may find it is best to only spend 10-15 minutes per day to update your channels and check on things. The one thing to be cautious of is that you may become more popular than you expected and then you will need to keep up communication with your loyal social media followers and fans.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
