When social media meets online shopping, all it can culminate is a guaranteed success for e-commerce businesses. There’s no denying fact that social media is now an integral part of everybody’s life. A dizzying number of people are joining social media on a daily basis and involve in a variety of activities. At the same time e-commerce has also risen exponentially, while social media is connecting people and companies in new and exciting ways.

During the starting days, popular platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram were primarily used for commenting, liking, sharing as they were oriented to people to people interaction. But now social media can be effectively used for business and marketing. Now, the purchase journey has become more refined and users can make purchases directly on their social media newsfeeds. In fact, 95% of adults between the ages of 18 – 34 follow a brand on social media. So various social media platform can offer an invaluable resource for marketers to drive sales online by reaching right audiences through targeted advertising.

There are some interesting facts regarding e-commerce and social media that we have compiled for you:

• Facebook is one of the top sources of social traffic and sales. Out of the whole social media sphere, 85% of orders come through Facebook.
• In 2013, orders from Reddit were increased by 152%.
• Facebook has the highest conversion rate for all social media ecommerce traffic at 1.85%.

So clearly, social media can further impact and influence e-commerce business in big way.

Increased Online Presence

Social media has the ability to not only point people towards new products or alternative deals, but to engage with them more absorbingly. The various social networks are functioning like digital highways with which people are communicating, finding information quickly, and increasingly shop for products. For online businesses, effective social media marketing provides real value. It is being used to reach first time consumers, reward existing ones, and showcase the best different brands have to offer.

Social media is one of the forefront forums today that can effectively disseminate quality content. Fresh, valuable, and informative content creates trust and authority with the online audience. This positive association creates a base of loyal customers. By making the content attractive people feel like clicking on the ads to know what marketers can offer them. In view of this, social media platforms are a perfect place for marketing business campaigns, which ensure online companies to remain in their customers’ minds before they make their purchasing decisions. Certain extensions can be added to make advertisements stand out from the rest. For example, user-friendly extensions like Magento Order Management can enhance order processing in a comprehensive manner. Therefore online presence is all about staying ahead of the curve by interacting with customers, advertise, and publish content.

Smart Targeting and Dynamic Product Ads

This is the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning and smart technology is trending on the top. Social media can leverage smart targeting by taking right content and target it to the right customers and the right time. A system based on algorithms and machine learning tracks visitor data such as location, browser language, and time of day. Using this crucial information, businesses can create different segments of visitors and predict the interest of each segment. It’s an effective way of providing a personalized experience.

Facebook, for instance, can provide marketers with numerous targeting options based on location, demographics, interests, hobbies, etc. It can also provide certain features like custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and retargeting. With this approach, it is easy to reach potential customers and engage them more effectively. Furthermore, Dynamic Product Ads can be used to retarget customers who have earlier shown interest on certain products or services. This feature can give a lot of flexibility as well as efficiency in functionality to e-commerce marketers.

Product Videos

With the help of interactive videos, online businesses can effectively convey to their customers how their products can be helpful. They enable the prospects to understand all the aspects of products virtually. Facebook and Instagram are the go-to platforms for showing product videos convincingly. According to a recent report, 90% of consumers find videos useful when deciding to make purchases online. In fact, video is the most compelling way to engage consumers, especially those coming from mobile devices.

E-commerce companies can use videos to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping experience. Product videos can provide a clear overview of the different scenarios in which different products can be used. In addition to using their business sites, e-commerce companies can leverage social media feeds as part of Facebook or Google ads. There are already many versions of videos that are becoming popular on social media. For example, Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, 360-degree videos, 30-second videos, time lapse videos, animations, etc.

Better Customer Experience

Social media has an immense potential to transform customer experience. It turns out, companies that thoroughly integrate social media in their marketing strategies can provide superior customer experiences. As a result, they can secure stronger growth and dominant positions in their markets. Social channels have made it easier for e-commerce businesses to interact with their customers and what they have to say. Today, a more response customer service is the bedrock for a better customer experience. Customers can instantly reach out to businesses by tweeting, Facebook messaging, or through DM on Instagram.

In this age of fierce competition, the end goal of e-marketers is to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy by meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Customer experience demands to address multiple touchpoints in a customer journey. Social media plays an important role in customer experience management. The branded, organic conversations on social media allows the data to be turned into an opportunity for highlighting customer pain points.

Some of the other crucial ways to enhance customer experience as well as social media interaction are security, support, bandwidth, loading time, and speed of the servers. This is where reliable webhosting service like Hostpresto can effectively manage all these features. As a result, the e-commerce websites achieve an improved performance and hence, increased customer experience.

Final Words

Social media is here to stay, so is e-commerce! Online businesses can harness the vitality of social media into their strategies for increasing their sales. Thus social commerce can phenomenally change the way online shopping is usually thought of. It will continue to evolve and consumers will be engaged even better.

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