June 25, 2010
Guest Post by Dimitri Onistsuk, Vice President of Marketing at Shopify
The social media revolution has made it possible for businesses of all sizes to reach an infinitely expanding audience. With the right integration tools, it’s simple and easy to automate your social media activities directly with an e-commerce storefront and eliminate the intimidating “time suck” that can accompany the move to a social marketing program.
What’s in it for you?
Connecting social media with your e-commerce presence allows even the smallest shop to tap into an enormous—and still growing—potential customer base. With more than 400+ million users on Facebook alone, this single network now boasts more traffic per week than Google in the U.S.
The real value in Facebook and other social networks is in their exponentially powerful word of mouth marketing. Where marketing was once an expensive game of cat and mouse that required an investment in costly ad space or air time in an effort to hopefully have your message seen by your audience when they were ready to buy, social networking uses the power of peer recommendations to spread the message to a much more captive and engaged audience.
New research indicates that more than 75% of consumers trust peer recommendations of products and services, while less than 15% trust paid advertising. The opportunity to tap into this trusted form of communication to market your e-commerce business is huge, so it’s important to think beyond your immediate network and find creative ways to encourage fans to spread the message about your business.
Direct Product Marketing
The easiest way to get started in the social media integration for your e-commerce business is with direct promotion of products, services, special offers and events distributed through a Facebook Fan Page or Twitter presence. By sharing news about new products, special offers for Facebook or Twitter followers and even exclusive events, you can build a loyal and engaged following that will want to share their “secret” find with their friends.
Contests, giveaways and special promotions designed to encourage fans to spread the message can help grow your network and customer base. For example, create a contest whereby the 100th follower to Re-Tweet your “deal of the day” receives a special discount or gift certificate.
CharmAndChain.com, an online jewelry boutique, has incorporated word-of-mouth marketing into their Facebook page by offering an incentive for the customer to tell friends about the store. By inviting 20 friends to become a fan on Facebook, follow on Twitter and join the mailing list, the customer is entered into a sweepstakes to win a $300 gift certificate. The message about Charm and Chain is spread exponentially.
Brand Building with Indirect Marketing
Besides direct promotion of products and services, social media provides an easy and effective way to build brand leadership, awareness and trust among your customers and potential customers.
Blogs are an excellent way to weave a bit more of your shop’s personality and expertise into the sales conversation without a direct sales push. Certainly blogging about new products and events is important. But, by also sharing your knowledge, tips and thoughts on industry news, product trends and other “big picture” aspects of the business, customers will be more inclined to turn to you for their purchases based on this established trust factor.
Active participation in community forums is another powerful way to maintain engagement with customers beyond the sales transaction. Answering questions, providing feedback and serving as an information resource in your own or other public forums positions you as an expert in your industry, someone your customers can trust and a company they can turn to in order to meet their needs.
Finally, don’t forget to integrate these efforts with Facebook and Twitter. By sharing a link to a new blog post over Facebook or Twitter, for example, you are able to expand the audience for your brand’s content over multiple media to reach your customers where they live.
Integration Tools Make it Easy
While integrating social media with your e-commerce presence may be free, it may still come at a price: your valuable time. Maintaining multiple online presences, pages and feeds can be extremely time consuming. Fortunately, with the right e-commerce platform, you can easily integrate—and automate—these efforts to save time.
First, build a Twitter applet, Facebook “Like” button and a blog feed directly into your storefront to make customers aware of your social presence and make it easy for them to find you.
Second, choose an e-commerce platform provider with social media integration tools that automate the distribution process. This way, when you add a new product, launch a promotion, post a new blog article or have any other bit of news to share, the message is distributed instantly and automatically across all the social networks you’ve established. With just a single point of contact to spread the message across multiple platforms, you can dramatically reduce the amount of time you invest in social media management to improve efficiency without sacrificing valuable customer engagement.
While it may seem overwhelming to step into the social media fray, the opportunity for growth by leveraging this evolving medium simply cannot be ignored. With easy-to-use integration tools at your disposal, building a social media presence can not only easily generate an impressive return on investment, but it can also be a fun and energizing way to interact with your customers and learn more about what makes them tick—which can pay further dividends long down the road.
Dimitri Onistsuk is the Vice President of Marketing at Shopify, a leading provider of e-commerce storefront software. Today, the company provides a simple and affordable online retail platform that allows businesses of all sizes to operate with ease and efficiency. Onistsuk can be contacted at Dimitri@shopify.com
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Great Post, StrongMail is doing a lot of work with large brands to integrate ecommerce, word of mouth and the social web. Check out my latest blog post on the topic at: http://www.strongmail.com/resources/blogs/monetizing_social_media/2010/06/lets-stop-talking-about-integr.php
its impossible to imagine that a startup today can survive without good social media footprint. But isn’t the “$300″ method kind of short term strategy and might end up upsetting some of the customers!
Using an application like Storefront Social (http://storefrontsocial.com) makes it easy to showcase and manage your products on a facebook business page to engage with your customers and showcase exclusive products–simple to import, and even can be linked up to your online store’s RSS/XML/Google Base feeds!
[...] More and more articles are being written about the emergence of the need to engage with customers online by showing products to them. Check out this interesting article about Boosting Ecommerce sales by using Social Media as a platform to engage your customers. See the article here > [...]
[...] How you can integrate social media with e-Commerce. Dimitri Onistsuk of Shopify gives us an overview of how e-commerce businesses can use social media to expand their market. Integrating into the social media landscape gives e-commerce companies the opportunity to access, as Onistsuk puts it, the “infinitely expanding audience” it offers. zippy cart [...]
[...] How you can integrate social media with e-Commerce. Dimitri Onistsuk of Shopify gives us an overview of how e-commerce businesses can use social media to expand their market. Integrating into the social media landscape gives e-commerce companies the opportunity to access, as Onistsuk puts it, the “infinitely expanding audience” it offers. zippy cart [...]
Integrate Social Media with Your e-Commerce Business…
The trend toward integrating social media with e-Commerce is here. Both of these powerful tools will remain critical in shaping online business, probably for the foreseeable future. How are you integrating social media and e-Commerce?…
Great post
but being the Vice President of Marketing at Shopify, don’t you think it’s odd that you are writing about social integration yet your own site has no facebook store app like your competition does?
I really would rather use your company’s services but this is a huge omission and I will have to settle for the another service.
Derek
Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you can do with some pics to drive the message home a bit, but instead of that, this is wonderful blog. A fantastic read. I’ll definitely be back.