Taking eCommerce forward with Social Marketing

A website’s success largely depends on receiving quality visitors, that is, visitors that have an interest or stake in the topic and content of the site.

Companies spend tens of thousands of pounds per month on Search Marketing and Pay Per Click, and consider those 2% conversion rates to be satisfactory. We say… that’s crazy!

The social web, such as sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have opened up great marketing opportunities to the early adopters. It’s now considered just as important to be on Facebook as it is on Google.

Why?

Because that’s where your customers are!

Facebook is the 2nd most visited website in the UK and US, and accounts for almost 10% of all time spent surfing the web. ComScore reported that Facebook is now closing in on 500 million unique users per month, with Twitter reportedly up to 79,000. Other stats worthy of noting include:

• Worldwide pageviews are up more than 150 percent to 220 billion a month (more than Yahoo or Microsoft).
• On average, across all visitors, people log in 11 times a month, up from 8.5 times a month a year ago.
• Total time spent on the site is 134 billion minutes/month, or about 7.5 percent of all time spent on the Internet. 

What’s important about advertising on social networks is the ability to not only target by location and keywords, but to filter by specific demographics.

What makes this so powerful is that you can advertise to exactly who you want, and work out how each of your target customers respond to different adverts and which give the best conversion rates.

Carefully planned, researched and executed, social marketing will dramatically improve sales and increase brand awareness.

To get you thinking social, here are our top tips for the average social setup:

1. Register a Twitter account and a Facebook page for your company or website.
2. Spend some time filling out all your profile details, choose a nice background on twitter, fill out your opening hours and include quick reference contact details, web address and/or telephone numbers in your profile descriptions.
3. Install the Static FBML application to your Facebook page, this will place a new tab on your fan page with a title of your choosing, where you can enter a custom web page talking about your company or products. You can set this yo be the starting tab for people that visit your fan page.
4. Use the Promote with Advert option to create adverts for your company or individual products. Ideally you should be embedding tracking code in to your website to see if these adverts actually work!
5. Contact us to discuss various resources and Apps that could work for you, like mirroring your eCommerce website within your Facebook page, or developing a mobile ordering App for the iPhone or Blackberry.

We challenge you to be inventive with your social business… Reward fans, push the free line, and promote two-way communication with your customers. Every single company out there has the opportunity to add value to their service offering, to some degree.

…Wishing you every success with your social web awakening!

Read more about the growth of Facebook over at TechCrunch.

Tags: ecommerce, facebook, online marketing, social marketing, twitter