Social Media and E-Commerce

E-Commerce has a tendency to over look using social media because its not seen as a market for directly selling products. This is true, however, proper use of social media and blog posts can indirectly increase sales to your e-Commerce site.

5 things that social media will do for your e-commerce business

1. Build Brand Personality
Every company, from the biggest corporate giant to the smallest mom-and-pop shop, has a brand. Just the big companies put more effort into creating a certain brand personality. Small businesses still have brand personality it’s just done unintentionally in most cases. The indirect nature of e-commerce makes it hard to build any kind of personality. Proper use of social media can increase that customer interaction and create a stronger brand personality.

2. Increase customer confidence
A customer of an e-commerce site has to put their personal information on to the Internet and make a payment to a person they have never met before. In this age of identity theft, people can be hesitant to divulge this information. However, if your company is active on social media and is interacting with customers regularly, it gives your business a human touch that boosts customer confidence.

3. Increase visibility
People use social media sites for more them just talking to their friends these days. Users of sites like Pinterest are actually going on the site to look for items to purchase. Putting your product in more places where potential customers are searching for products will increase the likelihood that someone stumbles across your e-commerce site and makes a purchase.

4. Helps with SEO
This applies more to having a blog on your e-commerce site. Part of the Google algorithm takes into consideration how much new content your site is posting and how often you are posting that original content. So for an e-commerce site that is not posting tons of new products everyday this is a good way to keep fresh content on the site to help the site’s overall Google ranking.

5. Free means of advertising
Advertising is crucial to selling a product. No one can buy something if they don’t know it exists. Social Media is a free way to get the word out about your products. So why not use it? If you’re going to pay money for ads on Google it makes since to put your product on an additional site, for free!