Thursday, January 23, 2014

BEST TIPS TO OPTIMIZE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR E-COMMERCE STORES

Social media are more and more important for website than ever
Most business  are taking use of  social media sites as a marketinng tools. However, in fact, most of them found  that it is not easy to get best the results and meet your expectations let’s find out some tips to enhance it in this article.





1. Understanding your customers need

Why should understand your target customers?
 No matter how good your product or service are, it is the fact that noone will buy it if they do not need it or there are some constraints keeping them away from buying. You cannot persuade them to buy your products unless you exactly understand  what customers really want.
Thus, it can be said that figureing out what customer needs is the key to sucess.

How to understand your target customers?
There are four-step process to understand customers to optimize social media

Step 1: Who are your target customers and what are their habits?
demographics research is a best choice.  Let's start analyzing age, gender, income, location, and then divide them into separate groups and continue to analyze other factors.
Next,  try to find out what are their habits such as how many hours they work and surf the Internet per day, whether they prefer online or offline shopping.
Now, you are in the first steps to build ideal customer details which will promise to raise your conversion rate.

Step 2: What are their goals and what do they value most?
If you know the reason why customers buy a product , it will be easier for you to meet their needs
 Firstly you should figure out the purposes of their visits: Are they intended to be taught?  Be entertained? What their goals, try your best to satisfy them by providing what they are looking for

Then, it is important that you know what they value most. Because buyers tendto behave according to what they feel, emotion  and feeling are the strongest motivators to drive their decisions.

Step 3: Where are they on the Internet?
 First, you should find out where your customers spend most of their time on the Internet such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, then what key words and phrases they often search for, what they are care about. Besides, ensure whether their buying habits were  based on your store’s public reputation or not.

As usual, Facebook and Twitter are the easiest ways to gather information about the stores’ offerings. And 44% of marketers reported to find their customers on Twitter.

Step 4: What are your customers’ expectations?

The quality of your customer service  result from your ability of meeting your customers’ expectations.
You can have a awesome team, but if your customers don't satisfy, your reputation will be suffers.
Moreover, it can be very challenging to know precisely what those expectations might be.
Therefore, I will mention some common expectations for you to consider:
efficient and accurate services
High quality products at reasonable prices
A friendly, helpful service staff
Prompt responses whether online, by phone or in person
A Sufficient stock to avoid long waits
A skilfful staff that can handle hard-solving problems
A professional interface design and an easy-to-navigate website

Although customers’ expectations are difficult to get, if you can do that, you are able to turn them become your loyal customers and boost sales. Moreover, as I mentioned, their buying decisions are directly influenced by the store’s reputation, so you can gain more customers who brings in additional business by word of mouth.

2. Be visible in the social media
Why should be visible?
In many case, It's hard for customers to find out the store’s profile in social media channels when they investigate your company information; meanwhile, a store’ social profile is an important factors of shopping behavious. About 20% of products or services purchased after customers research for information carefully on social media channels. As a result, if your store does not provide reliable information, you will loose sales and gain valuable exposure.
It is also a wise choice to have your full magento site living in facebook. Thanks to this, customers are able to buy products, register for an account right with Facebook app without approaching the webshop directly. You can also invite friend, recommend product to a friend or display the product on your own wall. We obtain all of these characteristics in one Facebook store theme
Here is my recommendation:
Magento Facebook store 
Besides, make sure your social media profiles are easily found and visited by search engines. And  you must remember search engines pay more attention to social signals such as votes up, likes, shares or +1. Social Media Optimization is now an important part of Search Engine Optimization.

How to be visible
The first thing you should do after creating a social media profile is to link your profile to your website. It is necessary to put icons of social media sites on website; linking to specific URLs. Moreover, remember to add “Like” and “Follow” button to allow customers to subscribe your store, and “Share” button on products pages and blog posts which encourages customers to share your updates in their own social media sites.

Make sure that your sites can get found by customers and search engines
For search engines
Bear in mind that not limited to some common search engines you know like Google, Bing or Ask.com, every social networking site have its own search engine and you should learn how these niche search engines work.
It is a good choice if you can put keywords in the important places of your profile or posting. When you focus on a specific keyword on your website or blog to generate traffic, make sure these same keywords appear in your profile. The good areas for keywords are titles, headlines, biographical paragraph, and description of your business, past positions and so on.
Besides, you should concentrate on long-tail queries related to your customers most frequently asked questions such as social communities and groups, be there to answer members’ questions

3. Be attractive in social media channels
Why should be attractive--> Content Is King which is very important to optimize social media
There is a common mistake that business owner tend post boring technical and product-related content in your social media channels
Your fans may not need your products, so try to draw their attention and engage them.
In reality, most of users spend their time to entertain on social media channels, so if you want to use social media for marketing, remember a rule “Content is King”. Your content should be brief & interesting  to attract customers to follow and share your content.
Beside, customers also love deals, if possible try to attract them by hot deals. To be honest, this way are working efficiently which increase both numbers of potential customers and sales
By the way, I recommend you use Magento Daily Deals to make sure that your site can work as effectively as possible during your Marketing campaign

How to become attractive
As usual, the creative and flexible usage of events, photos, videos, music, etc.  is easy for customers to like, comment and share your content in their own sites. However, keep in mind that you must balance these kinds of content with text. In other terms, you need to create easily shareable entertaining and engaging content that makes sense for your brand.
Over to you
So, how do you think about these ideas to promote your e-commerce store? What else do you want to know to improve social media effectiveness?
Leave us a comment and we are glad to hear.
more details: http://www.mage-shop.com/

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