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Don’t you hate those cheesy branded ads that popup on your feed?
No, I don’t want to hear your jingle, you anonymous office worker.
On the other hand, when I see an influencer I follow show off a product, I immediately want to know more.
DTC brands are revolutionizing the way they use social media.
If you want to stand out and continue to grow your eCommerce business the right way then you have to use social media completely differently.
There are a lot of new growth strategies that came out in the last year, and in this post we break down the top 5 ways that leading eCommerce brands use social media to unlock massive growth.
Let’s dive in.
1. Social media as a customer service channel
First and foremost, treat your social media channels as another way to engage with your customers. It’s common practice for consumers to ask questions, share how their experience went, and even complain about their product.
You constantly need to monitor all your social media accounts and your brand hashtags and answer each customer.
Nike has one of the best customer service accounts on X. They are called @nikeservice and they are available 7 days a week and support customers in 6 different languages.
Here’s an example of them responding to the customer, and even offering to print a receipt for him from a store in a different state.
That’s how amazing they are at customer service.
They put all of this effort into responding promptly to customers because they know that it’s 5X more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. And with the rising advertising rates it could be even more these days.
Speaking of advertising, eCommerce brands are innovating there too.
2. Use influencers & UGC for your social ads
It’s not enough to post influencer shots or user-generated content. That’s just the beginning. Brands found that these images perform the best on their social media ads.
In fact, studies show that UGC is 35% more memorable than branded content. And it has an effect on sales too. UGC-based ads get 4X higher click-through rates and result in a 50% drop in the cost-per-click.
We looked at several hundreds of ad creatives of the world’s leading eCommerce brands and found that a vast majority of them were using influencers and UGC in their ads. Here’s a slide deck we did of the Top 250 eCommerce Ad Creatives.
Here are some ways that you could use influencers for your social media ads:
- Make a 2-minute explainer video showing how to use your product
- Make a 30-60 second review or unboxing video
- Make a musical-style commercial with a catchy song
- Show off your product with VR/AR
Speaking of videos, there’s a new video format that’s getting a huge uptick in engagement and conversions - live video.
3. Live video & Live Streaming
Video became the rage a few years ago, and eCommerce brands use it everywhere, from social media to their product pages. In fact, videos on social media generate 1200% more shares than texts and images. And it’s easy to understand why.
The rise of the live streaming platform Twitch showed the world the power of live video. It’s more engaging and effective than regular video content.
Don’t believe it?
Check out these stats:
- 80% of consumers prefer to watch live videos from a brand than read another blog post
- 47% of live streaming video viewers globally are watching more live videos than a year ago
- 63% of people aged 18-24 watch live streaming content regularly
Mike Allton, one of the leading social media experts in the world, thinks that live video is the top trend in social media, especially for eCommerce brands. Check out his recent interview on the live streaming to learn more. You should also use ai chatbot for ecommerce to boost conversions!
In fact, live streaming has recently exploded in China. The live commerce market in China grew from $3B to $171B in 2020.
Most of the brands that are trying live streaming sell apparel and fashion but other categories are popular as well - beauty, electronics, even home decor.
Here’s an example of the fashion brand Pink Coconut Boutique promoting one of their products via live video:
4. Leverage Pinterest for massive organic reach
A lot of brands underestimate the awesome power of Pinterest.
Let me tell you a story.
A few years ago, I was working for a home decor company. They hired me to set up their social media channels and grow their audience.
I started with Facebook and Instagram. Twitter was pretty much dead so we skipped on it. Then I tried growing our Pinterest.
We quickly grew to 2K followers (which is a ton for Pinterest) and started getting 200k impressions on a monthly basis. That’s way more organic impressions then we could have gotten from Instagram or Facebook. At one point one of our pins went viral and we started hitting 1-2M impressions per month.
AllBirds, the famous DTC company, is doing amazing things on Pinterest. First of all, they have 12K followers and 2.7M monthly views.
They display their product categories right at the top, to help users better navigate their Pinterest account.
Also, they use shoppable pins (or product rich pins) that show you each product from different angles and take the user straight to the product page.
5. Use social media automation tools
Last but not least, there’s automation.
A marketing team would not be able to create and optimize content in all these different formats and all of these different platforms without a great social media automation tool.
Use an automation tool to:
- Publish content across multiple channels
- Reschedule evergreen content
- Monitor all of your brand mentions
- Respond to all incoming messages, comments, and shares in one place
"We’ve actually been using eclincher for several months and absolutely love them. Highly recommended, it’s one of the only social media tools that gives you all the features you need in one place."
Recap
Your social media strategy should highly depend on the size of your team and your resources.
Do you have a dedicated designer? Videographer? Content writer? Do you have the social media tools required to use some of these strategies?
Also these strategies will work better for brands in certain industries. So always do your research and find out what your competitors are doing and what’s working best for them.
