How Social Media Can Skyrocket Sales

By 2021, it’s almost impossible to ignore social media as a brand—there are currently approximately 4.33 billion social media users globally. With companies selling on social platforms, many aren’t seeing the sales increase they expected, possibly because of the stereotype that running a social media account is overly simple and easy. 

The tips below will prove that social media marketing takes time and effort, but can provide your brand with more awareness, sales, and even customer loyalty.

8 Ways to Increase Sales on Social Media (Including Examples)

1. Join the Right Platform for Your Audience

Using your brand’s demographics and buyer persona, match those numbers with the corresponding platform. Instagram is geared towards visually pleasing content and has a generally younger audience. 28% of Facebook’s 2.7 billion users are men aged 25 to 44, while 42% of Twitter users are between 18 and 29.

 Knowing which platform will give your brand the highest engagement will get you one step closer to increasing revenue off of your posts. 

1. Create Great Content

Obviously, you’re going to want to post content of your product. Make sure those photos and videos are very high quality. Perhaps a less obvious strategy is to create educational content for your followers. Put together tutorials that use your product or even that just have to do with your industry. 

At the time of writing this, L’oreal Paris’ most recent Instagram post shows a model teaching the viewer how to use a night hair cream, and the post gained 725,000 views in five hours. While all of those viewers will not become instant customers, the likelihood of visitors clicking through to your site will only increase with more engagement. 

Another content strategy is to post lifestyle content. Followers may get frustrated with daily posts that are obviously selling them something. Posting content that has to do with your industry and audience without throwing a product in the viewer's face will be attractive to those people who follow the brand.

1. Utilize User-Generated Content

Show your followers how satisfied your current customers are with your product by sharing photos or videos created solely based on the fact that they love what you’re selling. This can act as easy (and free) proof for potential customers that it's worth it to spend money at your e-commerce store. 

To convince customers to create content with your products, incentivize them with giveaways, promo codes, and contests. Create a unique hashtag for the users to include in their post to make it easy to find all of the submissions. 

Depop, an app created for people to sell their clothes right from their house, runs their social media by posting content that is mostly user-generated. They repost high-quality photos of different style clothing being sold on the app to their 712K followers to push even more consumers to download the successful eBay-like app. 

1. Hire Influencers

Getting in contact with influencers is not a new, innovative strategy—putting your brand in front of a devoted audience through a trusted source can do wonders for your sales. However, ensuring you find a perfect fit is more important than ever. 

One of the most important steps in finding the right influencer for your brand is calculating their engagement rate. It may seem like the best idea to go with the person who has the most followers, but in many cases, those accounts aren’t getting nearly as much engagement as influencers with a smaller, more loyal following. Micro-influencers are gaining more popularity for brands due to their higher engagement rates. 

To calculate engagement rate, simply add up the number of likes and comments on a post and divide that by the number of followers. Finish up by multiplying that number by 100 to get the percentage of followers who engage on the person’s posts. 

For example, youtube star and internet entertainer Liza Koshy has an engagement rate of 2.5% based on her last post, while lesser-known influencer Lauren Giraldo rounds out at 8.4%. Looking at Kellie Sweet, an influencer with about the same amount of followers as Lauren Giraldo, her account has an engagement rate of 4.4%. Therefore, it’s important to look at that percentage especially when viewing influencers with a similar amount of followers, because the number of people actually seeing their content can be drastically different. 

Another way to find influencers is to use an app, such as GRIN. GRIN puts everything in one place, making it so the experience is professional and simple for both you and the influencer. Plus, it’ll save you loads of time in the long run. 

1. Use “Shopping” Features

As a social media rule of thumb, every time a platform releases a new feature, they likely want users to use that new feature. This in turn means they will promote posts using the new features more than posts without them. 

Shopping is one of the relatively newer features on Instagram and Facebook. It only takes a few minutes (or with Instagram, a few days since you have to get approval) to set up your catalog on the apps, so there’s no apparent drawback to participating. 

Letting users shop directly on Instagram and Facebook posts will create the sought-out Amazon feel and experience. One brand that has mastered this is Wayfair, a furniture and decor company. When adding products to their posts, they saw a 258% increase in users who found their website through social media. 

1. Engage With Your Followers

At its very core, engaging with your followers is responding to what they comment on the posts and message to the account. Depending on how much engagement you’re already getting, that may be difficult to do. If you’re only getting 10-20 comments on a post, see if you can respond to all of them. 

The person you’re responding to will feel seen as a customer, and Instagram will recognize the engagement on your account and reward that with more post boosting in the Home page algorithm. 

Don’t forget to check the posts that are tagging your account, and the posts that are using your store’s location (if applicable). Those followers are tagging your brand to get your attention, so why not give them what they’re asking for! 

Sometimes, folks use social media to say negative things about your brand. While no one wants bad press, those are good opportunities to both gain feedback on your products and diffuse the situation quickly. 

NM Incite reported that 71% of users who experience positive customer support on social media are likely to recommend that brand to other people. It’ll be beneficial to keep up with your social media mentions, whether the interactions are positive or negative. 

1. Facilitate Discussions

Luckily for brands, there are a few spaces on the internet where people naturally come together to talk about a product or service. Facebook groups are a great example of that. 

Instant Pot runs a Facebook group called “Instant Pot Community” with 3 million members. People ask questions about the features of the device, post photos of their recipes, and share cooking hacks. 

The group is rarely used by Instant Pot to sell more of their products—it’s truly there to create a community for happy customers to interact with each other and learn from each other. From there, marketers can get loads of feedback about their products. 

1. Be Consistent

The final and likely most important tip for growing sales via social media is being consistent. If content isn’t being shared in a timely manner, there’s no reason for people to follow your accounts. Quality is more important than quantity, but there still has to be a strategy put in place to post content often enough to keep your followers interested.

Engagement and follower counts don’t skyrocket overnight. The process is slow and sometimes frustrating, but after working on being intentional with your content you see growth. As your accounts grow, there become more opportunities for higher engagement and therefore more sales and higher revenue. 

Conclusion

Social media has the potential to strengthen brand loyalty, increase sales, and win back customers that have issues with your product or service. However, the bottom line is if you want to see your social media presence enhance your business, you have to spend time and/or money on it. Hiring a social media manager or agency is a must for seeing any ROI in the social media space. 

Your social media won’t be as helpful if your e-commerce store isn’t up to date. Contact us to spruce up your store, redo it entirely, or build it from the ground up!