Jun 09 2011

How To Increase Your Online Sales With Social Media

Whenever new potential clients or inquiries come in regarding ecommerce, I usually take a long deep breath because the client has so many issues and misconceptions. These issues include aspects of ecommerce SEO ranging from automated SEO systems to duplicate content and many other things.  Every time I have to write a brief email regarding this matter and explain to clients what exactly we are going to do for their website and how real SEO techniques differ from the misconceptions that are out there.

A few hours back someone asked me for my opinion about ecommerce websites and their calibration with social media. The question sounds simple but it is an important question so I thought I would share my opinion with others! So is social media integration important and if so, how?

Millions of websites are on the internet selling different products and if you are selling general stuff like electronics or computer hardware then the market is even tougher. Stores like Best Buy and others are also selling the same products and these stores often have six or seven figure marketing budgets, professional technology and marketing departments that make competition by smaller companies very difficult.

Ecommerce and Social media is a perfect handshake because through social media your business has a greater chance to cater potential customers for your website. You can reach out directly to consumers that you otherwise would miss.

Create Your Facebook Fan Page:

Like it or not, Facebook is the giant being the most powerful social network today. The good thing is that Facebook is very business owner friendly. Facebook allows business owners to create their pages online and market their product to the wider Facebook audience. Create a powerful and user friendly Facebook fan page for your online store where people can come, like and share your products if they want.

Encourage People to Like and Share Your Product:

According to research 90% of the total purchases are subject to social influences.  Buyers tend to buy products that are recommended by their friends. This is so true that Microsoft recently integrated many more signals from Facebook into the Bing search engines. Now, when you do a search Bing will actually show you likes from your friends in the results.  Therefore, you want to encourage people to like your fan page and when you update products you want people to share those products with their friends. This will have a direct impact on your overall sales.

Add Social Media Buttons on Product Pages:

You read blogs, right? I believe most of you do… so what do you do once you are finished reading an article? Quickly close the window if you didn’t like it but what if you really like the article, you simply find the social media buttons most probably facebook likes, share, the tweet button for Twitter and few others.

Spreading the words is very important;  adding social media buttons to the product page of your website will produce a positive impact on your rankings and sales. You are actually leveraging your visitors to do the job of marketing for you. If a visitor is on the product page and he likes your product he will most probably share it with his friends and other likeminded people.

Be Active and Talk To Potential Customers:

To get the most from social Media you have to engage your customers. Being active and talking talk to customers directly will help you build trust among your fan base.

Build Your Brand and Trust Among Your Fan Base:

Talking to your customers through the use of social media works well. I would personally advise you to use twitter as a customer service platform and you can solve your customer problems as well as inform people about your company, products and services. This will increase your fan base and allow customer to trust you, thus overall sales will be positively affected.

Case Studies:

In writing this article I was surfing the internet to see if I can find some good case studies regarding this topic and I found an interesting infographic that shows the following cases studies:

Conclusion:

Social Media if played right can be very helpful in generating sales online. Ecommerce and Social Media is a great combination for brand building and sales generation.

What do you think about this? Please let us know your thoughts!

About the Author:

Moosa Hemani is an I.T. Expert with Bureau24, a Las Vegas SEO company which has provided best of practice SEO and Internet Marketing solutions since 2004. We recently started the series Optimizing Your Website For Better Search Results to help people improve their search rankings.

5 Responses to “How To Increase Your Online Sales With Social Media”

  1. Scott says:
    June 9, 2011 at 1:59 pm

    Very good to show how the big boys do it. Small businesses should alway role model. Thanks!

    Moosa Hemani Reply:
    June 9th, 2011 at 2:48 pm

    Thanks Scott I tried to make this post a bit different from others and bring some facts as well… people are really board of Social Media Theory they need to know if this is going to work out or not so i researched and bring what big boys are doing and one can follow…

    Scott Reply:
    June 9th, 2011 at 3:14 pm

    Search engines are gathering, indexing and watching the social scene, at minimum businesses need to get into social to be more interactive with their customers and fans. The ranking benefits are yet to be officially measured, but business growth is expanding in social networks, so people need to adopt best practices and if it turns out confirmed signals are coming from social media then they will be set.

    Moosa Hemani Reply:
    June 9th, 2011 at 8:07 pm

    Google at latest SMX and and before in Google Webmaster central videos and infect Bing also conforms that they do count social signals as a Ranking factor Although its hard to say how important is that for right now but despite the ranking benefits one should involve in the social media marketing in order to build its brand over the internet and social communities and interact directly with fans and customers…

    Although over the time i believe social signals will have more impact on ranking overall….

  2. Hightech says:
    August 13, 2011 at 8:42 pm

    Yes social media stay one of the most importat way to increase sales.