Your Social Strategy is Bad

Pretty profound title, but more than likely it does if you own and operate and e-commerce site. I know, you might be thinking I am talking to other people, because you post to Facebook and Twitter everyday. More than likely though, I am talking to you though. How do you separate your company from the other companies? A better social media strategy!

Quit Preaching to the Choir

This is the biggest problem I have noticed with a lot of social media accounts. They simply post their products or their blog posts, and that is all they post. Think about it critically, unless you are selling a consumable product that people need to reorder regularly, you are telling people who have bought your products how great they are. Quit, it will end up making people ignore your account. Post news in your market space, post things that your customers will be interested, then you can grow your reach.

Monitor your Competitors

One of the best ways that you can find out what actually works and creates user interaction is to monitor your competitor’s social networks. Are they getting a good response from their offers? Are they getting a lot of retweets and interaction? One thing that I tell my clients is to follow all of their competitors, they can give you great ideas. I have found a lot of people think it is a concession to follow their competitors, you are not losing anything by following them, if anything you are gaining by following them. Watch their social media strategy, see what works for them, see what does not and emulate the good aspects of their strategy.

Exclusive Offers

Make you customers feel special for following you on a social network, have special social network only promotions. Flash sales on your social networks are also a great way to show your appreciation and get more followers. You have to give you customers a reason to follow you.

Create a Posting Schedule

This is huge, I notice companies that post only once a month or once every two weeks. Who are they reaching? They really are not gaining new followers, they are sending the same messages every so often to the same people, who if truth be told do not care. Create a schedule, it does not have to be complicated, make a post a day or two posts a day. With my accounts for dh42 I make around 224 posts a week. I know, right, that sounds huge, but it is really not. I post the same thing to 4 different networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google+) and I make 8 posts to each a day, 7 days a week. How long do you think I spend on social media a week? I spend under 30 minutes, it is all about your set up.

Leverage Social Reviews

The best way that I have found to leverage social reviews into your ecommerce / social media strategy is using Yotpo. If you are not familiar with Yotpo, it is pretty awesome. The main feature of Yotpo is that after a purchase you can set an interval to send emails to the purchaser and ask them to review their purchase. In the whole mix it will also allow them to post the review to social media networks or it will allow you to post the review to yours. Since my clients have started using Yotpo we have on average seen about a 200% increase in people writing reviews for purchases. The best part is that it is totally automated, you set it up once and forget it.

Contests

How are you acquiring new followers? What is your cost to acquire a follower? More than likely the cost is too much. Using tools like Rafflecopter to acquire followers are a no brainer. Think about the prize in the contest not as a giveaway, but an advertising cost. I have a client who we run Rafflecopter promotions for regularly. Normally the prize amount is around $30 retail price, but around $12 actual cost. For giving those prizes away they typically earn about 600 new followers across all of the social platforms that we hook the Rafflecopter giveway up with. That equates to about $.02 a follower, Facebook or Twitter advertising cannot touch that.

Outreach

Do you tweet at other people in your market space? If not, I would highly consider doing it. This is a great way to get more exposure for your site and your social media accounts. All it takes is a couple retweets to flood your site with traffic. I tweeted to addthis one time and they retweeted my tweet, that resulted in a 5000 visitor pop to my site. How you out reach is the most critical part of doing the out reach. What do people like? People like things that make them or their company look good. They retweet them so that people can see that either they or their product are valuable. What if you composed a tweet like this “@Prestashop You guys are awesome, my store at site.com is running perfect” or “@addthis We have had a 200% social increase at site.com since installing your app”. Those are compliments, companies want to share their compliments, it makes them look good. At the same time it exposes you and your brand to all of their followers.