How to Create a Regular Flow of Social Media Content

If you’re an eCommerce store owner, social media is one marketing tool that you simply can’t ignore. Doing so would be like having a storefront without any signage. It’s a relatively easy and affordable way to call attention to your business.

Users spend, on average, almost 2.5 hours per day on social media. And it goes a long way towards building and supporting brand recognition — almost 40 percent of customers only trust brands that they’ve interacted with on social media.

It’s especially important for eCommerce-based businesses. Aside from the brand recognition benefits and community-building opportunities, social media posts can quickly translate to sales with a click or two.

In order to do social media right, there are several rules of thumb:

1. Consider where your target demographic is most active. Wherever that may be — whether it’s looking for dinner inspiration on TikTok, asking for gift recommendations on Facebook, or researching software options on LinkedIn — you need to meet them there.
2. Determine what platforms make the most sense for you, and then commit to being active and engaged on them. You’ll have way more success choosing one or two platforms, rather than getting overwhelmed by trying them all. There are dozens of platforms, and new ones join the social media game every year. Be strategic about where you’re spending your time.
3. Be authentic. Your business and its leaders are unique. There’s no other company in the world that’s exactly like yours. No other business shares your brand story. Assess what sets you apart and lean into it.
4. Remember that social media is a two-way street. Besides pushing out quality content, schedule dedicated time to engage with your followers by commenting, sharing, and liking.
5. Analyze your posts with a fine-toothed comb. Identify what’s resonating best with your followers. And then do more of it.
6. Create a content calendar and schedule your posts. Don’t wing it. You wouldn’t wing a radio advertising blitz or a billboard campaign. Social media deserves the same level of care, forethought, and attention as those more traditional marketing tactics.

Long story short, we’re living in a social media world, and you can’t ignore it. And though it can seem time-consuming and daunting, it doesn’t have to be. Here we share eight strategies that will have you posting consistently and effectively with minimal time investment.

Your customers have questions. And you have the answers to those questions. So, why not be proactive and feed them those answers before they even ask? 

Do you have an FAQ section on your website? That can be a great source of content. Are there common questions that your team is regularly fielding from current and prospective customers? Add these queries into the content calendar queue and help your customers out by answering a question they didn’t even know they had yet.

Post discounts and special exclusive sales. Since a cardinal rule of social media is to take it easy on the selling, you’ll want to make sure not to overdo this one. But a limited-time offer now and then could be well-received by your audience. Better yet, make promotions more interactive by tying them into contests or giveaways.

Remember how we talked about how your business is unique? Show off just how unique it is with some behind-the-scenes insights. 

Share company news (now shipping internationally!). Profile team members (meet Angela, our head of accounting plus resident cat lover). Share photos from the Halloween dress-up contest (Jim takes the gold this year with his three-hole punched paper costume). Highlight charitable or philanthropic endeavors your organization might be involved with (who can forget the Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race for the Cure?). 

Xero Shoes does this well on their Facebook account. This approach resonates suitably with their 90,000+ followers.

Social media provides a perfect platform for delivering value to your existing customers and your wannabe customers. What kinds of tips would ensure a seamless experience for someone using your product or service for the first time? Perhaps there’s a step that people commonly miss. Could you highlight that? What new products are in production? 

Any time you can alleviate a pain point for a customer, that’s a win. Veer, for example, posted a video with a helpful tip for attaching a canopy to their cruiser. Customers might not know that’s even possible, so this information can be both helpful and encourage them to buy the retractable canopy in addition to their cruiser.

Evergreen content is timeless. It’s not time-sensitive, nor tied to a specific fad or trend. Evergreen content is your friend. It can be repurposed time and time again to bring people to your site long past its initial publication. And social media is the perfect place to do just that! 

Blog posts, white papers, on-demand webinars, case studies, miscellaneous landing pages on your website… all of these can be shared multiple times throughout the lifetime of that particular resource. A robust ecommerce content marketing program contributes to success across every facet of your organization.

Do you know what’s easier than conceptualizing and creating from scratch? Curating content. Find relevant posts from customers, partners, and industry experts, and rather than reinventing the wheel by creating something similar, just go ahead and share it. Not only does this give you high-quality content with minimal effort, but it can also deepen engagement with those people. They may even share your content in return. Win-win!

Godin Guitars does a beautiful job of sharing the love on their Instagram account by featuring photos of customers with their guitars. In doing so, they’ve amassed almost 50,000 followers and a lot of engagement.

In addition to sharing your own ideas, explore opportunities for user-generated content. User-generated content is anything that is created by individuals and shared online. Once upon a time, organizations had to rely on costly production teams to create videos or stage photo shoots to get images of your product in action. 

This is no longer the case. 

With a smartphone in hand, anyone can shoot a video or photo and share it online. Finding creative ways to encourage your followers to do so, and being able to piggyback off of their followings, is a social media goldmine.

Establish a hashtag and launch a contest for the best posts that use it. Create a post and ask people to submit their favorite pictures in the comments. Let visitors unlock a discount code by sharing a quote or picture of them using what you sell. There’s no perfect recipe, but get creative and see what works for you!

Social media can easily be a full-time job if you let it be. But there’s a better way. Batching your social media posts so you can deal with them on a weekly, as opposed to daily, basis can save a ton of time and effort. Jetpack, HootSuite, and Buffer are three examples of such scheduling tools. Jetpack, our preferred tool of the three, has advanced functionality that includes:

• The ability to connect multiple accounts;
• Access to an image library that can be used for posting to Facebook and Twitter;
• The ability to pre-schedule posts and have them auto-publish at a specified date and time;
• The ability to re-share content at a later date; and
• Access to robust social media analytics.

Not only can social selling be a game-changer for organizations, but it can also be a lot of fun. It provides ample opportunity for creativity. 

So, get creative, think outside of the box and, above all, have fun with it. Check out our suite of WooCommerce extensions to further up your social media game.

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Kathryn Marr