One of the main advantages of being an E-Commerce merchant is that you already have a good presence on the internet. Of course, that presence varies regarding your SEO and SEA strategies. The main advantage is that the means of communication you can use are directly connected to your website. You might have understood, I am talking about social networks. In order to differentiate from the competition, you need to establish innovative social media strategies.
As you may already know, each and every of these social media has different purposes, features and communities. Thus, this means that they have to be used with caution. For example, different internal processes are executed in order to differentiate, once again, from your competition. Here are some strategies you can apply on your E-Commerce in order to reach a larger community and extend your branding across the internet.
Corporate Communication and innovative social media strategies
Definition
First of all, what is corporate communication? Do you often talk about yourself on social media? It’s kind of the same thing, but with your company. This strategy’s main goal is to create a positive image of your business in people’s mind. Extending your branding in a positive way should be one of your priorities.
Don’t hesitate to show your company behind the curtains. Customers are genuinely interested in discovering more about some internet companies.
Where should you apply this Corporate Communication and start your innovative social media strategies?
Some social networks seem to have been created especially for this special type of communication. Indeed, if you want to be innovative, you need to:
- Have a visually attractive communication ;
- Provide qualitative and informative content ;
- Retain people on your social media.
Launching your visual communication
One of the best ways to drive your company’s branding through the internet would be by choosing the visual path. Multiple solutions exist. Social networks have reorganised their feeds and timelines in order to gain interest from their user. What is the best way to do it? By choosing visually attractive posts.
A lot of social media are specialised in visual posts. Which ones? Instagram and Pinterest are among the most popular ones these days. Indeed, the first one allows you to post pictures / videos in tandem with Facebook, while the second one allows you to “pin” your posts in order to share some moments of your day, your ideas or favorite pictures to a large community.
Instagram’s features have been including live broadcasting, stories and traditional posting for a long time. Lately, Instagram launched its new IG TV feature. This feature allows you to post 1-hour long videos to the social media, which were then limited to a few minutes until this integration.
Pinterest is entirely oriented towards visual communication. Video is getting more and more advantaged by the social media, who is always in advance regarding digital trends.
As you might have understood, visually oriented communication is not just putting pictures on your social networks, it consists of posting videos. This mostly consists of devoting time to creating and posting interesting videos to your social media.
Providing qualitative and informative content
In order to retain your customers and your community, a visual communication is not enough. Its main goal is to attract people on your profile. Once these users are on your profile, you need to retain them, or direct them to your other social media profiles, or even better, to your website. Leading them through your different profiles only increases your branding value.
Qualitative and informative content can be shared easily on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. It is easy to share some news about your company and / your website on your FB and LI profiles. You’d like to really innovate? Go for SoundCloud.
Facebook, for example, lets you natively post your Instagram pictures on your feed, which would permit you to ally visual and informative content. Like that, it catches your targets’ eye and retains them to your profile. This kind of posting allows you to start your innovative social media strategies.
LinkedIn is also ideal if you want to share news and updates with your community. Indeed, you can share posts to a particular segment of your community, depending on their talked language and region. This would allow you to target different people at once, and share different news affecting different parts of your customer base. The social media also posting in tandem with Twitter, as long as the post in question is under 280 characters. Also, the network is perfect to share articles. In effect, you can write articles directly on the platform and instantly share them.
SoundCloud allows you to share audio files with your community, which can be redirected to your other social media platforms and your website. The platform’s easy integration makes its audio files easily shareable on multiple websites.
Finally, Twitter can be a good and quick way to update your community on your business’ changes. The network doesn’t really count as qualitative since the updates and news that will be shared on it will be prompt.
You have to keep in mind that you have gained your visitors’ attention. Once it’s done, as mentioned earlier, you need to retain them. If not, all these efforts done to drive your branding through different social platforms will be considered as senseless.
Retaining visitors on social media
Social media users’ interactions with posts are getting briefer and briefer. This is why you have to create some added value and interest potential visitors. The more your following will increase, the more people will see you as a big brand. As said before, your positive branding has to be driven through the internet.
If your brand is powerful on social media, there is a great chance that it will be the same on search engines. With a good SEO strategy, you’ll be able to create a real digital empire. As you may already know, people attract people. The more followers you’ll have, the more followers you’ll get. This is why you have to put time and efforts into retaining your visitors to your social media.
How can you do that? Blending informative, qualitative and visually attractive posts would be the best option. Using all your social media as a whole would also help you to retain visitors on your profiles. People like to see different facets from a company, which you can show on different social platforms, as advised before.
Don’t forget to create bonds with your followers. Ask for their opinion and feedback, exchange with them, whether it is about your products or about your field’s actuality. They will feel privileged and will want to come back to your profile more often, slowly turning them into ambassadors, which is the whole point of creating and driving your branding: creating a community of ambassadors talking about you.
Product Advertising and innovative social media strategies
Definition
This might be the most well-known advertisement option. More and more brands are advertising their products directly on social media platforms. This type of communication on targeted social media allows them to then target specific communities. Indeed, each social media allows you to reach different niche interested people and age groups.
A lot of social media has started to innovate and add new features to help you increase your sales on their platforms. Plus, as you already know, most of these platforms’ helpful insights allow you to track your promotions’ effectiveness.
Where should you apply Product Advertising and start your innovative social media strategies?
There are multiple ways to create a real added value and reach new communities to generate a mass following towards your social media profile, merged with increased traffic to your E-Commerce website. These new product advertisement means to allow you to diversificate in order to avoid your customers to be bored with your ads.
Targeting the right social media
You might already know that different communities are present on different social networks. This is where you can innovate. Trying to reach these said communities requires different actions and means of communication.
As you can see, social platforms like Facebook and YouTube represent all age demographics. Facebook is slowly turning into a video platform, meaning that you have to adapt your communication to its new trends, as mentioned before. YouTube represents the same challenge for you or your community manager.
We can see that social networks like Instagram, Snapchat (picture-oriented platforms) and Twitter represent a large part of the 18-24 years old’s population active on social media. Instagram and Snapchat tend to put the fun forward. Why? Because their community is quite young. This is where you should start your innovative social media strategies.
Once again, Instagram and Snapchat are present on the 25-29 years old segment, just as micro-blogging and professional-oriented social platforms Pinterest and LinkedIn. These advertising opportunities represent dedication from community managers. Indeed, every shared content has to be adapted to the social media’s orientation and its major population. Product Advertising’s aim is to reach as many people as you can, and not closing doors from certain communities.
If you are planning on advertising your products across these multiple channels, keep in mind that you need to be flexible and adaptable. Thus, your posts and their tone have to resemble both your company and the social platform, at once.
How you can track your Product Advertising campaigns’ effectiveness
A lot of you, who are currently reading this article, already know about social media and their insight tools. They are quite effective, show you what you want to know in real time.
For example, Facebook allows its professional users to use their Business Page to run and check their ad campaigns. You can check different elements of your campaigns like their costs, their effectiveness in terms of reach, clicks, etc. What has changed recently is that you can also do the same thing with Instagram. Indeed, launching and checking ad campaigns on the picture-oriented social platform can be done directly on your Business account. Of course, both accounts have to be linked together.
All the other social media platforms also permit you to follow your activity with their insights’ tools. Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat allow you to run multiple types of ad campaigns and to follow them via their insights. Multiple types of ads can be ran through these social platforms. The most interesting and visually attractive ones are launchable on Snapchat. Indeed, the app’s Discovery section allows you to do both Corporate Communication and Product Advertising.
The biggest downside of checking every social media’s insights, it’s that you have to go through every social media (except for Facebook and Instagram). Some tools exist to gain time and check your activity across all of your social profiles. Each of these tools can be specialised in specific social media. Buzzsumo, Gleam or Woobox are some of these tools that cover almost every social platform you can use for your communication. These solutions’ multiple plans allow you to adjust your offer to your needs.
Features allowing you to launch innovative social media strategies
It seems like not a day is passing without a social media announces some new options to its already existing offering. As mentioned before, Instagram has recently launched its improved video feature with IG TV, for example. It is not the only thing the social platform is now offering. Facebook’s picture of social media is now testing a permanent Stories bar. This new would allow your Stories to gain more visibility since they’ll spend more time on-screen.
Voice assistants can help you change your ways and start your innovative social media strategies. How? More and more people in the USA are starting to use these useful assistants. Ads can be done by the voice, like if it was on the radio. This is where innovation starts since you’ll be able to adapt your content to your targets.
Snapchat’s project to launch an in-app gaming platform could also help you reach more people. Indeed, everybody knows that video games have been trending for a few years now (besides superheroes). If done properly, Snapchat’s project could attract a lot more people on their application and allow you to target different communities more effectively. Plus, the social platform recently launched its audience insight aiming at helping you with your campaigns’ tracking.
Conclusion
Thinking and launching innovative social media strategies can be hard and represent a heavy task in your E-company. Indeed, it takes a lot of time to create posts targeting special social platforms and their different communities. What you need to do is searching where your niche community is the most active. Once it’s done, you can launch, track, and enjoy your campaign!
Image credit : Jonathan Larenas
