Today, most consumers head online and check out reviews—both written and video reviews—for any product or service that they are currently pondering.
With the growth of social media and the grip it has on our world, companies of all type and size across all industries have started to build a presence on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in recognition of the true power it wields.
Social media has the power to make or break business reputations and by having a presence online and integrating social media with your e-commerce site, you instantly begin to build a better reputation for yourself and can exercise more control about how your company is presented online.
The Rise of Social Media for Businesses
Businesses have always followed where their customers go. While once upon a time it was shopping malls, parks, towns, and cities where customers spent most of their time, today this is not the case.
Regular people such as you and I spend so much of our time using social media platforms today that businesses have been forced to take proactive steps in reaching out to us on social media. Right now, there is a very strong relationship between e-commerce and social media, so much so that it is described as a mutually beneficial; without a strong social media presence, many of today’s new, popular brands would never have enjoyed the same levels of success.
Given that studies have shown that e-commerce stores with even the most basic social media presence take, on average, an extra 32% in sales than those that don’t, you can appreciate the importance. If you are launching your own brand, consider implementing an e-commerce web design that lends itself to platform integrations.
Why Social Media and E-Commerce Are a Perfect Match
By giving store owners a free, convenient, and scalable means to show their product(s) and/or service(s) to the world, social media ticks all the right boxes.
1. Social media tells people that your brand is alive
Social media platforms are the perfect place to put yourself in front of your target audience and show them that you are there, you are real, and that you are alive. How else do you expect to do this?
Sure, you can implement a digital marketing strategy—and this is something you will need to do as an e-commerce site owner—but, today, these start with social media anyway. Social media marketing is huge and in Q4 2018, Facebook took $16.91 billion in ads.
By putting your brand on social media, you present yourself to a worldwide audience that is online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
2. Social media is perfect for taking advantage of impulse buys
If you are selling a physical product, there is a huge amount of money to be made by positioning yourself in a place to mop up impulse buys. Since most customers want instant gratification, not much thought goes into purchasing things that are seen on a social media platform. What’s more, the customer benefits from the convenience of not having to go out of their way to visit a store and pick up what they want.
With so much convenience a mere few clicks away, it is important to ensure that your company has a seamlessly integrated e-commerce store with your social media pages—websites that load quickly and deliver a positive user experience drive up impulse buys. This is something that professional e-commerce designers can do for you.
3. Together, they boost SEO naturally
Social media encourages the liking, commenting on, and sharing of content. When this happens on a large scale, it not only helps to build a brand image but also bump you further up search engine results pages. While being on social media alone won’t work wonders for your SEO, it is still a part of the bigger picture.
If there are lots of good things being said about you on social media platforms and your website and its pages are being shared a lot, your SEO rankings will increase. Higher rankings mean more people find you and more sales are made.
Creating and implementing an SEO strategy is something any good e-commerce website design agency will be able to help you with.
4. You have a means to easily communicate with customers
When you have worked hard to build up a customer base, you should always be communicating with it. If you want to fend off your competition and see your e-commerce site grow, you need to play the long game and part of this game is communicating with your followers. Customers are regularly looking to engage with the brands and companies they value—simply replying to a comment on a picture can be enough to boost satisfaction.
Engaging with customers is easy—from replying to comments on posts to putting together surveys, there are plenty of ways you can do it. As an e-commerce site, it is typically harder for you to retain customers than it is in other industries, so everything that you can do to drive up satisfaction counts. Social media engagement has been proven to aid customer retention by several studies and surveys.
Social Media Isn’t an Optional Extra
It doesn’t matter what you do, how you do it, or what industry you do it in, a presence on social media linked to your website or e-commerce store is not an optional extra. It is something that every single brand needs to do and do properly—both small start-ups and large established organizations—to establish or maintain a competitive edge in their market.
Implementing social media channels on sites that are relevant to your e-commerce site is by far the best way you can engage and convert a broad target audience. Alone, the fact that virtually every single established and successful e-commerce company has a social media presence should be evidence enough—these platforms have proven their worth and delivered huge ROIs time and time again for companies of all shape and size.
If you would like to learn more, contact our leading e-commerce web design company today.
