Despite the fact that ecommerce and social media would, on paper, seem to go together like peas and carrots, some brands place a digital wall between their ecommerce and social strategies. Some brands even place physical walls between the teams working in ecommerce and social. Generally, social channels are excellent for driving engagement, and building brand awareness, but they tend to do little to drive conversions, or even traffic on ecommerce platforms, especially in the short term. That phrase though “in the short term” is the key. If you integrate your social and ecommerce strategies, you can create a symbiotic relationship between the two that will set you up for long-term success. Here are four steps to integrate social with ecommerce.
Make sure all of your product pages have social sharing buttons. Make sure you have buttons for the most popular social platforms — Twitter, and Facebook — but also make sure you include less popular sites that help drive conversions like Pinterest. You want to give visitors to your ecommerce web site to share products they like, especially on platforms like Pinterest that allow them to bookmark products they might come back to purchase later.
Create visually interesting, shareable coupons to post via your social platforms during peak buying seasons. If you have created a coupon code for a big promotion, make sure you put a little creative muscle towards creating a coupon that you can post on your social channels, and encourage your followers to share it with their friends.
Add a Twitter feed to the homepage of your ecommerce site. If you are creating great content for social platforms like Twitter, why not get a plugin that posts updates from your Twitter feed directly to your homepage? This will allow you to engage visitors to your ecommerce platform with the same great content you use to engage your followers on Twitter.
Make sure the look of your ecommerce platform and your social media channels matches. Keep your design consistent across all of your real estate in digital space to drive home the message that what your followers see on social is coming from the same place as the products listed on your ecommerce platform.
Looking for more strategies to make your site’s ecommerce elements more social? Take a look at ShareYourCart and the rest of our digital marketing toolbox.
