Promotion Through Social Networks:
10 Powerful Strategies for E-commerce

Promoting a brand on social media is task number one for modern business. What strategies are effective? How do you measure the result? What should a successful marketing strategy include? Read on to learn how to effectively promote through social media. We have prepared a review of 10 powerful e-commerce strategies for brand social profiles.

Modern social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok) offer a whole suite of powerful built-in tools for online brand promotion. By classic brand promotion, marketers typically understand:

• spreading information about the business,
• increasing customer loyalty and trust,
• advertising goods and services,
• attracting a target audience,
• stimulating sales.

What is e-commerce in social media? This concept includes promotion, but the main task is the strategic use of social media platforms for selling, attracting, and supporting customers in the context of e-commerce.

E-commerce marketing on social media includes:

• creating and promoting online store pages on social networks,
• direct selling of goods and services on social media platforms,
• interacting with potential customers (responding to questions, comments),
• customer support after sales,
• analytics of customer interaction to improve marketing strategies.

A well-developed and implemented e-commerce marketing strategy on social media significantly enhances business efficiency. What are the advantages of direct selling of goods and services on social platforms? Let's delve into this further below.

The range of benefits from employing e-commerce in social media is indeed vast. Let's list the points of efficiency that most impact profitability and business scalability.

• Reaching and attracting as many target audience members as possible,
• Increasing the level of visits and targeted actions on the brand's website,
• Building trusting relationships with clients,
• Consistently increasing customer trust in the brand,
• Direct, ongoing interaction with an active audience in real-time,
• Boosting the sales of goods and services,
• Improving customer service through instant interaction,
• Attracting customer-generated content (UGC) for business promotion,
• Enhancing the website's search engine positions.

Statistical data indicates: online stores with a strong marketing strategy for promotion on social media sell 32% more than brands not using social platforms! Are you convinced of the power of e-commerce marketing on social networks? But are there still questions about how to sell on social media? It's time to move on to harnessing 10 effective marketing strategies for promoting a brand on modern social platforms.

What should you do to avoid grappling with the unmanageable? Set clear, measurable goals! This is the first and crucial step towards building a successful marketing strategy for brand promotion on social networks.

Here are examples of goals a business might strive for when starting with social media:

• attracting "N" amount of traffic to the online store's website,
• increasing sales by % directly on social media platforms,
• receiving "N" number of inquiries from potential clients, etc.

To ensure that goals are realistic and achievable, you need data at the point of starting to build your marketing strategy. Also, each goal should have a deadline — a final date by which you will be able to analyze the marketing strategy and adjust it to improve results.

A marketing strategy for brand promotion on social media always starts with goals and also includes a detailed analysis of target audience profiles and planning of relevant content.

How do you define your target audience (TA)? Answer a few questions, and then delve into each one.

• What is the gender and age of your customers?
• Where do they live and what do they do?
• What are their interests and preferences?

After thoroughly collecting and processing statistics about potential buyers, you can move on to creating a content plan. Content should be relevant, meaning it should meet the primary queries and interests of the audience.

How to Create Relevant Content?

• Study your target market and competitors' content.
• Choose the most suitable formats for your audience (photos, videos, infographics).
• Create and post content, monitor customer reactions.
• Edit your content based on the data gathered from experience.
• Experiment with new forms of content, track feedback.

For greater accuracy, it should be noted that different social media platforms might have different formats of relevant content for potential buyers. How do you choose social networks for brand promotion? We'll discuss this in the next section of the material.

The selection of social networks for business promotion depends on the target audience, their preferences, and interests. It is generally believed that most millennials prefer Facebook and Twitter, while the younger generation is more active on TikTok and Instagram.
For instance, for a fashion brand, having a presence on Pinterest is crucial because, according to the network's statistics, the majority of its users are female (over 60%).
In reality, you can find representatives of your target audience on any popular social network. Therefore, experts recommend covering as many social platforms as possible. It's important to remember, however, that the content will vary in format for each one. Hence, it's crucial to adapt the same content to the formats of different platforms.

How to Adapt Content for Different Platforms? Let's give an example:

• Publish detailed text material in your blog.
• Reduce the text volume to a post with a link for Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Design the text into an interesting infographic for an Instagram post.
• Shoot a short, dynamic video on the topic for TikTok.
• Use snippets from the video for Instagram Stories.
• Create a compilation of vivid images with a brief description and a link for Pinterest.
• Thoroughly presented material should be edited and posted on YouTube.
• Use cuts from the full video material for Reels.

In fact, any engaging content can be adapted to various formats according to the popular content trends on each platform.
When planning resources for content creation, consider budget constraints and choose priority channels with the highest concentration of potential customers according to demographic data.

An attractive design and a properly formatted signature in the profile header are necessary and important conditions for promoting a brand on social networks. But optimizing profiles for search algorithms is equally important.

How to optimize business profiles on social networks? Here are the essential elements that a brand page should contain:

• The name and focus of the business.
• Logo and recognizable brand style.
• Location or geographic scope of operations.
• Catalog/list of available products/services.
• Contact information.
• Link to the website.

Remember to include keywords that match the relevant search queries of potential customers. Also, don't forget that hashtags are still effective and help people find your content, and often, get it to the top of search queries in the social network.

According to Backlinko statistics, 99% of all social media users worldwide access them from mobile devices. Notably, there are 4.48 billion registered users on social networks, constituting a large part of the world's population.

Therefore, when creating relevant content, you should always focus on mobile devices. The same applies to your online store, to which you will be providing links in social network profiles.
In simple terms, ensure that your e-commerce marketing strategy for social networks is fully user-friendly. Smartphones generally have small screens, so every element of graphics, trigger buttons, captions, photos, and videos must be adapted to the sizes of the most popular smartphone models.

Here are a few expert tips for optimizing content for mobile devices:

• Use only high-quality images with high resolution, which can be enlarged and easily viewed on small screens.
• Provide users with a straightforward instruction for ordering goods and services.
• Utilize built-in features for creating advertising content on social networks (with formatting tips).
• Add short hashtags and shortened URLs for quick clicks after viewing advertising content.
• Include a clear call to action in your messages — explicitly state what customers should do if they like the offer.

To increase demand and sales on your social media page, it's crucial to provide users with the simplest possible action instructions! The easier it is to find and select your goods/services, the more trust and sales you will generate.

If you're directing customers from social networks to your site, it must be optimized for mobile devices! That means no large text blocks or long scrolls. Clear images, highlighted registration and purchase buttons, simple short forms, and prompts are essential.

Has your page gained reach and a flow of target customers, but your direct messages are overwhelmed with unprocessed inquiries? This is a direct path to the collapse of all efforts and the loss of advertising budgets! Chatbots will help ease the processing of customer inquiries, relieve managers and consultants, and significantly improve the level of customer service and sales from social media profiles! What is a chatbot? It's a friendly virtual assistant created using conversational marketing technologies. Over 50% of users confirm that they are ready to make purchases through a chatbot because it's simple, fast, and efficient! What are chatbots capable of?

For example, they can:

• Respond to a client's request with a greeting and current offers.
• Provide a detailed answer about products and services.
• Assist the customer in choosing a product based on a personal request.
• Guide the customer's actions in making an order in real-time.
• Provide consultation to the client at any time of the day! Chatbots are an important modern tool for successful e-commerce on social networks (and websites too!). Using chatbots for support and processing customer requests makes online shopping on social networks genuinely convenient, easy, and familiar to users. By adding chatbots to your social profiles, you improve the customer experience of making purchases on brand pages, and you also simplify the lives of managers.

What is UGC content? Translated from English, User-Generated Content literally means content created by users. In practice, this looks like user posts and stories in which the brand's page is tagged. Most often, these are photos or videos with reviews, instructions, or overviews of products and services. How to encourage users to create UGC content?

• Provide bonuses, special offers, discounts for brand tags.
• Be sure to interact with customers, repost their tags.
• Create special hashtags and challenges, offer pleasant gifts for posting tags.

UGC content indeed acts as a powerful element of business promotion on social networks. When customers express admiration, gratitude, or recommend your product or service to their audience, the brand's page attracts more and more warm targeted audience. All because user-generated content demonstrates the real experience of users and genuine interaction with your brand.
Through the attraction of UGC content, trust and authority of the brand grow among the audience of potential and actual customers. It's important for reviews and tags to come not only from influencers but also from ordinary customers with average profiles of your target audience.

Modern people highly value their main resource – time! Therefore, any content you produce for the audience should be as short as possible, while also being precise and engaging.

How to navigate the optimal time for content consumption? Here are some expert life hacks:

• If it's a blog post, the text should take no more than 30 seconds to read.
• A larger amount of information is better presented in a dynamic video of 15-30 seconds.
• Don't post videos longer than 1 minute.
• Present textual information in an interestingly designed infographic.

The general rule of content brevity to engage and retain the reader's attention is clear. But what specific content should brand pages focus on? For this, we've compiled an up-to-date list of expert recommendations.

• Tips and hints on choosing or using products and services.
• Step-by-step instructions for improving user experience.
• Quick demonstrations of products or services in dynamic videos.
• Manufacturing secrets or a "behind the scenes" section.
• Inspiring stories of users or team members.

Effective content is always succinct, accessible, and appealing for distribution. If the field allows, you can also use irony, memes, and humor (but with tactful caution).
What content formats are currently topping the charts? Unquestionably, it's Instagram Reels, Stories, and videos on TikTok.

Digital marketing specialists' statistics show that more than 72% of modern youth have their idols on social networks. These are bloggers, influencers, or opinion leaders—all about the pages of users known for various reasons with a multitude of subscribers.
Collaboration with opinion leaders in modern e-commerce is called "influencer marketing." From the name, it's clear that brands try to influence the product choices of the target audience through their idols—bloggers.

How to use influencer marketing in the strategy of promoting a brand's social profiles?

• Find popular influencer pages that your target audience follows.
• Analyze how well the blogger's page matches your brand's values.
• Set clear goals for your advertising strategy using influencer marketing (gain trust, increase loyalty, boost sales levels).
• Engage with selected opinion leaders.
• Establish the rules and agreements of your collaboration.
• Encourage bloggers to create authentic content with your products.
• Help influencers create creative content featuring your products in their unique, recognizable style.
• Monitor the effectiveness of involving opinion leaders in advertising campaigns (analyze the timely provided statistics).
• Build long-term partnerships with influencers who prove their effectiveness and enhance brand promotion on social networks.

High competition on social platforms requires attracting opinion leaders not just as one-off advertising platforms. Make popular bloggers in your target audience true brand ambassadors to earn user trust and improve your standings in a competitive environment.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social platforms have powerful tools for collecting and processing statistics. But to truly keep your finger on the pulse of progress, you should, at a minimum, master a number of special analytical tools.
To confidently grow and succeed in promoting a brand on social networks, it's essential to constantly monitor results and adjust marketing strategies. This is assisted by built-in analytical panels for evaluating the effectiveness of publications, tracking, and comparing such indicators as click-through rate, conversion ratio, and sales.
It's great if you also use analytical tools for your site from Google Analytics. There you can see which social platform brings the most relevant traffic to your site.
Besides numbers, in truly successful brand promotion, it's equally important to constantly monitor the interests and preferences of the target audience.