Social media and ecommerce are the peanut butter and jelly of the Internet. They simply go together well. However, many online sellers out there are acting as though they have a peanut allergy because they are simply not leveraging the power of social media for their business. This is proving to be a mistake for those companies, and you do not want it to be a mistake for your business. Make sure you are adding social media tools and buttons to your ecommerce site, and you will see that it can make a difference in your exposure as well as in the number of sales you are getting.
Putting the Social Into Ecommerce
Make sure you are embedding the Like and Share buttons from Facebook onto your product pages on your site. Do the same with Twitter buttons, Google +1, Digg, and other sites. To make this truly effective, you have to put the buttons on all of the products in your site. These buttons are so prevalent today that everyone knows what they are and what to do with them. However, you might want to have a little call to action in the description or somewhere on the page to give them a reminder.
Reviews on the Pages
Another way to get social on your ecommerce site’s pages is by adding reviews to the products, just as you see on sites such as Amazon. In fact, this is popular on most online retail sites today. Let the customers review and rate the products they buy right on your site. This helps you in a number of ways. It gets social interactions happening on the site by letting the visitors participate, and it gives you more content for the site, which could help with your SEO.
It also shows people that the site is real and that other people are buying from it. Some people are skittish when it comes to buying online from sites they don’t know. Seeing and reading reviews from other customers can help with this.
Add a Blog
If you have an ecommerce site, you should have a blog attached to it, and you should be putting up fresh content up regularly. The content should be relevant to the types of products you sell, naturally. This gives you better SEO, and it can attract people to your site for the content, who eventually become customers. With a blog, you are able to extend your brand and become something of an expert in your field. For example, if you sell jewelry or luxury watches on your site, then you will want to create posts around those subjects.
If you have trouble coming up with content for the site, you can always work with freelancers to create content for you. When you start a blog, if you want it to be a success, you need to make sure that you are putting up regular content. It does not have to be daily, but it does need to be often enough to satisfy your readers. Keep in mind that the blog should be in the service of your actual business, the ecommerce site.
Social media is here to stay, and you can ignore it at your own peril. It’s important to embrace it and integrate it into your overall marketing and selling plan so you can make the most of the benefits it can offer. Just as you can do with your blogs though, if you find that you don’t have the time to deal with all of your social media tasks, you can outsource them, or hire someone at the company to handle them for you.
Resource: http://www.goecart.com/Products/ecommerce-social-networking-computing.aspx