Why Is Social Media So Important In Ecommerce?

Nearly half of the population in the world uses social media. It no longer simply functions as a tool for play; but it’s very important for work purposes too. The eCommerce world benefits greatly from combining social media with their marketing, social proof and customer engagement strategies. 

Social Media In Ecommerce

Social media (SM) can play a huge role in driving eCommerce sales. Firstly it brings awareness to products. Social proof works through social media more than through any other avenue these days. User Generated Content (UGC) functions as the way that word-of-mouth recommendations used to. 

If you have a viral post, maybe created via influencer marketing, this can expand your outreach hugely. Targeted ads and promotions increase brand awareness, and SM messaging means that more people can contact you easily. Since many people use SM messaging services anyway, they feel comfortable to contact you in this department.

Benefits Of Social Media

Brand Awareness

Social media is so important in eCommerce because it’s one of the main ways that brand awareness is boosted. Whether this is through targeted ads, competitions, promotions, UGC, influencer market or even TikTok trends: they all matter.

Having a well curated social media plan means that your presentation should be on point. There should be a color scheme and image quality that crosses all platforms. The merchandising strategy should be holistic and appealing. 

This will create a strong brand which will help shoppers identify you. Once you are identifiable, they will remember you, and if they haven’t chosen to purchase from you straight away, they might later on. 

Customer Engagement

If your social presence is updated, exciting and creative then shoppers will be encouraged to get involved. This will create a community element for your business. This is useful in terms of creating lifetime customers.

Likes, follows, comments and shares are all the currency of social media. Within eCommerce, this engagement leads to purchases and a growing brand. Furthermore, the social media data that can be gathered from these kinds of engagements should not be overlooked.

You can learn from your customers immediately, and use this knowledge to update your strategy. SM messaging means they can easily get in touch; and having people monitoring these chat systems can be very useful. The more you know about your customers, the better.



Social Commerce

SM does not only function as a counterpart to eCommerce sales. It actually can cater for sales to be made within the system. Social commerce means that people can purchase products without even leaving the social media app.

This is super important in appealing to younger generations of shoppers such as Gen Z and millennials. This is because the eCommerce world is a place they feel comfortable in. Therefore making purchases over this platform is encouraging and easy for them.

Not having this option means that you may be losing out on potential sales. 

Assessing The Audience

Social media allows you to understand your audience and their needs. You can see what competitors are doing in terms of:

• Marketing
• Promotions
• Tone
• Images
• Prices

Using all of these statistics will help you to understand what to offer that will capture imaginations and increase sales. SM is a great way of pinpointing your USP and developing this.

Mobile Friendly

Over time, more and more people turn to M-Commerce and make their purchases over social media. It is already optimized for apps, and makes shopping easy. Especially image heavy social apps such as Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest lend themselves to eCommerce easily.

Visual merchandising as well as hyper-tagging that allows for products to have tags that then can be followed to the items are great ideas. These create a smooth transition between social media and sales, whilst boosting customer satisfaction.

Don’t Be Left Out

In short; if you don’t have social media as a part of your eCommerce strategy, you are missing out. Marketing, social proof and brand strengthening all take place here. Customer awareness and engagement takes place here. The more people know about your brand, the higher sales will go. 

Social media will continue to grow in prominence. If you don’t have a social presence already, you will need one soon. It’s a huge market with a whole load of potential. This is why it’s so important. If you want your business and brand to grow, this truly is the way.