Social Media Channels – Driving E-Commerce

I’ve spent more than 12 years managing and overseeing e-commerce business streams.

Before you focus upon social media, you must ensure that your ecommerce site’s technical performance and UX is excellent – supported by a CRM system with an email broadcast process in place.

Over these last 12 years social media has become increasingly important in driving traffic (referrals) to ecommerce sites. This applies as much to B2B as B2C businesses and shows no sign of slowing down. Obviously which social media channel is the best is highly dependent on your product/service is and your target demographic (and customer behaviours).

Over this time, I’ve used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok and LinkedIn to drive e-commerce traffic. I’ve also used Facebook and Instagram shops to sell product directly since they set up direct sales platforms a couple of years ago. In fact, these were very good for more B2C orientated products and those that were more visual. At Photocentric I had some success selling a range of hobbyist resin via Instagram.

In terms of social media channels for a B2B business, LinkedIn is by far and away the best social channel to drive ecommerce sales. All the social media channels have a contributing role to play in driving traffic and should be considered as part of an overall strategy, but as I write this at the end of 2022, LinkedIn is the platform to start with.

Obviously, the success of using LinkedIn is contingent on making the best use of its functionality and using it regularly. If you do this then, in my experience, its consistently delivered the largest number of transactions and highest levels of revenue. In fact, at Photocentric, referrals from LinkedIn

Firstly – it’s a peer-to-peer business networking platform – although the total number of platform users aren’t as a high as platforms such as Facebook and Instagram there’s a far higher concentration of your target audience.

Unless you pay for adverts or LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator services, then its free and the functionality options that you have at your disposal are perfect for engaging with your customers wherever they are in the sales funnel.

LinkedIn is a fantastic content marketing tool.

You can…

• Create stand-alone posts helping to reference your products and services.
• Newsletter feature – prospects can sign up and you can readily build a contact database.
• Post images and video – showcase your products, their features, and benefits
• Encourage interaction – sign-ups for webinars, competitions, highlight promotions etc.
• LinkedIn also has great targeting and segmentation tools and I’ve also had success with great ROI using their paid adverts when targeting specific segments.

LinkedIn enables you to engage with customers and prospects directly. You can build an engaged audience, build your brand and therefore leverage your expertise and your position within the market.

LinkedIn is great at providing pre-sales support to customers and supporting product launches. As well as your own content, you can encourage user generated content (UGC) from existing customers – this is a great way of building advocacy and further referrals.

From a social channel perspective – both Twitter and YouTube play a really important role in supporting sales and customer retention. This is particularly true from my experience of dealing with technical products. Twitter is very good for receiving and delivering immediate responses out in the field and YouTube is an excellent resource for providing video support to cover areas such as product installation etc.

So, in conclusion, for a B2B organisation, LinkedIn is great at driving traffic for ecommerce and Twitter and YouTube are great complementary channels to support aftersales and help with retention and re-purchase.