For today, social networks can be for real considered a means of business. Many commercial projects, especially startups, are being launched and developed exactly in social networks. Moreover, quite often they don’t even go beyond.
Social media is also useful for disseminating your crowdfunding idea, promoting a non-profit organization, online shop or a mature enterprise. Social networks usage and perfect integration with your website thanks to the existence of right custom business applications will bring fruitful results for you, your customers/users and audience.
What are the main benefits of the social networks usage?
Focus on the target audience. Thanks to social networks pages you will feel comfortable to target your advertising and check users’ profiles. Promotion will be highly focused, as targeted ads in social networks will allow focusing on any demographic group.
Cost-effective promotion. The experience shows that the prices for promotion in social networks are really within the pocket of any e-business.
Feedback and support. It’s highly convenient to relish communicative possibilities of social media to work with customers, at the same time aggregating all the data in one place.
Metrics and estimations. A large number of social signals can be estimated and examined thoroughly. Thus, we receive accurate information about audience’s reaction (likes/dislikes, opinion polls, shares, retweets, etc.) to certain events, news, products and services.
How to suck significant advantage out of social networks
Here you need full and improved integration of your e-business with social media. It’s not all about trivial social buttons on your website, it’s about professional business tools, including API, provided by large social platforms.
So, take a look at some integration tips that will be in aid of your e-project.
Social networks plugins. If we refer to online stores, it is pretty logical to add such social buttons as Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, excluding LinkedIn due to its specific orientation.
Authorization via social media. As everybody knows, every online shop requests creating a user’s personal account to track activities, purchase history, etc. In this case it would be a bright idea to satisfy your customers by simplifying the process of registration on your websites via social networks.
Sales integration. Many social-active users surf the platforms, so remember to apply the button “Buy now” on your social network page, redirecting the potential customers to your online store where he/she will be able to make a purchase.
Sales metrics. Do not forget to integrate your metrics with sales statistics to have a clear picture on your audience and sales sources.
Promo games. This type of integrating your e-business with social networks seems the most cost-intensive and painstaking, as game projects are initially quite expensive. On the other hand, their efficiency and attractiveness to end-customers is really high. Consider the possibility of elaborating a Facebook app and integrating it with your e-business.
Product reviews, comments and feedback. The placement of social network comments under your products’ description or within the purchase history is also a handy tip for presenting your products/services as high-quality ones. However, do not overestimate your clients’ loyalty, as not all the comments turn to be positive.
User-generated content. Here we are talking about users’ experience, i.e. photos/videos of real persons (not models) who purchased your product and now demonstrate it in practice, sharing pictures and comments. This kind of integration is possible thanks to rightly put hashtags in social networks. Such a method will allow boosting activities around your product/service, increasing its popularity.
Share activity. Let your present and future customers share their steps on their social networks pages by giving a possibility to do posts about purchases on your website via a “share” button. Thanks to such posts people will see which online store is right for them to go shopping.
Yana Yelina is a website design and development expert at EffectiveSoft.