Have you tried Twitter for boosting sales of your E-commerce store? Do you have a dedicated social media strategy for Twitter-based marketing?
Is the answer ‘No’? You might want to read these stats:
- Of the entire E-commerce store using Facebook, 60% of them are also on Twitter, according to Big Commerce.
- At the beginning of 2019, 326 million people were active on Twitter. Out of which, 67 million users were from the US and 259 million are international.
- 80% of Twitter users browse the site on their mobile devices.
- 66% of brands which has over 100 employees use Twitter Marketing.
- 26% of Twitter users in the US check the open the app multiple times in a day.
- 20% of the Twitter users in the US visit their Twitter profile at least once a day.
- 12% of Americans trust Twitter for staying up-to-date with the latest news.
- According to the Twitter blog Twitter users purchase from online stores at least 9 times in a month, while for non-users it is only 4.3 time.
- 49% of female shoppers on Twitter admit being directly influenced by the posts and making purchase decisions.
Twitter is presumed as more of a professional social media platform. Users see posts and profiles on Twitter as more authentic and direct from the brands. Now, if we analyze the stats given above from various sources, we can conclude that Twitter has evolved as a marketing tool for E-commerce stores to promote and entice genuine customers to their platform.
From influencer marketing, general Tweets, to paid advertisements, Twitter has an array of opportunities to grow your E-commerce brand and drive boosted sales.
Let’s explore the possibilities of using Twitter for engaging, re-engaging and winning over customers with a strategic plot. Here are some strategic ways to answer the big question –how to grow your E-commerce business on Twitter?
1. Engage And Build Interest Among The Audience
Everyone knows Twitter is important. As a brand, you are expected to have a Twitter account, and more importantly, it should show that verified ‘Blue Tick’. However, just having a verified Twitter account is not enough to attract users, neither photos or videos of your product will help to kick-start your Twitter marketing.
The first step is building a brand presence and then working on a follower’s base of people interested in your brand and your kind of product. This first step could take a lot of time. However, you can leverage some easy tricks to get noticed by the relevant users.
- You can do what others are doing on Twitter. Create Tweets and Memes relevant to your industry, product, or services.
- Inspect the trending hashtags relevant to your brand and create Tweets to join a popular conversation.
This is Etsy proves its CSR by promoting an important topic and ensuring its business is with the cause. It doesn’t only give a positive message for the brand but also ensures that it allows only legal products on this craft marketplace.
This initiative by the platform will encourage wildlife lovers to share the tweet and also the people will be more interested in buying a product from a responsible brand. Moreover, it has also promoted its content that would eventually lead the readers to the platform.
2. Create And Trend Your Own Hashtag Campaigns
One of the best ways to establish yourself as a brand on Twitter is creating your own hashtags and attempting to trend it. There are several platforms and off-the platform factors that influence the trend.
Identifying such a trend and using it for promoting your own hashtags can help you gain massive popularity and a lot of new followers. Consequently, it will boost your brand name and generate sales.
Follow these thumb rules for creating your own hashtags, and you will have a good chance of trending:
- Keep it unique from other trending hashtags.
- Keep it relevant to your brand and industry.
- Make it short and simple to write.
- Use catchy words or phrases.
The bottom line is, you need to create an impressive hashtag and encourage other users to use this hashtag for getting exposure. You can leverage trending topics on the internet or in the physical world and write hashtags inspired but relevant to your brand. For example, you can leverage the Christmas or Black Friday to put on some catchy and unique hashtags.
The best way to trend would be getting someone with large followers to use the hashtag and it will multiply to become a trending one. Another way is incentivizing your hashtag with rewards and conducting campaigns with free giveaways and gifts. For this, you can bundle your hashtag with multiple other trending and well-known hashtags with more followers. Something like this:
Trending your own hashtag will ultimately boost your brand awareness and more people will get acquainted with your business.
3. Tag Along With Celebs And Twitter Influencers
Influencer marketing can act as a sudden push to your brand’s awareness and more people adding up in your follower’s base. You can have different agreements with the influencers. You can tag along for the whole brand promotion or just a particular campaign.
Moreover, influencer marketing on Twitter is not just limited to celebs, TV stars, movie stars, or sports stars. It gives you cross-platform access to associate internet and social media influencers to your campaigns.
For example, you can get in terms with YouTube or Instagram influencers and ask for promotion on all the platforms accessible to them.
Caution! Influencer marketing is volatile in nature. It can even backfire in the same intensity. To make the best possible use, you need to take care of certain aspects:
- Work with influencers relevant to your brand.
- Don’t ask the influencer to make vague promises.
- Don’t force them to talk in favor of your products.
Keep things clear, simple and honest. The best E-commerce marketing tips in can give here is not forcing Influencers to sabotage their relationships with their audience to promote untrue claims. Try to build a healthy relationship and things will work in favor.
4. Engage With Prospects Using Direct Messaging
It’s not just the brand that encourages people to buy from you. It is also the actual people they seek. They want to know if real people are responsible for the store and they would be available when asked for help.
Besides integrated Ticket Management System and help portal on your official site, customers go to official Twitter accounts with their questions and grievances. For that, brands receive thousands of direct messages in their Twitter in-boxes.
It may not be possible for big brands to reply to every DM, but as a startup and developing a brand, you should definitely reply every concerning DM in your Twitter inbox. You this opportunity to solve address grievances, solve the problems, answer queries, generate leads, and build healthy relationships with integrated prospects.
In short, dedicate some time on Twitter chats; it will improve your brand’s credibility in the very beginning itself. There is a huge chance that customers going happy from your chat will make repeat purchases. There are different add-ons and tools in the used for organizing the Twitter chats and DMs. You can use them to handle even a huge number of communications.
Bonus: In addition to the DMs, prefer addressing the even Tweets with grievances or queries to your brand. Track the mentions and hashtags for your brand and use the opportunity to address the Tweets and prove that you are a responsible business.
5. Use Sponsored Tweets To Get A Boosted Attention
Despite making all the efforts to gain organic exposure, things might go a little south and visibility might not achieve the optimum level.
In such a situation, Twitter’s sponsored Tweets come extremely handy for the newbies. For the time you don’t have many followers, you can ensure a perfect targeting of the relevant audience with these paid Tweets. These are nothing but the Ads promoted by the platform.
Advertisers purchase ordinary Tweets and promote them for their clients to reach a wider group of users or to spark engagement from their existing followers. You can subscribe to a sponsored Tweet package from an advertiser, set up a campaign with relevant keywords, Hashtags, and audience profile. Based on your presences, the platform will display your Tweets to the precise audience.
Brands of all level use this method to gain extra exposure and conversion boosting. It has worked like a charm for many new entrants as well. Here is an example of a Sponsored Tweet:
6. Improve Visibility With Twitter Cards
Twitter cards can be an ultimate way to boost up E-commerce sales by advancing the direct visibility of your listed products in Tweets.
If you have enabled them on your web store, they will make sure that when users share your product page on Twitter, it displays your product on Twitter as a card with much useful information about the shared product.
The shared product is shown with a snippet of the product page content, displaying many details such as product price, and offers, etc. Considering the normal Tweets have word limits, you can actually compensate for that by embedding a Twitter sharing API in your E-commerce product pages.
Conclusion
These are some cutting edge ways and E-commerce marketing tips to boost your sales with Twitter. The platform carries as many opportunities to fix things in your favor as an E-commerce business.
You just have to identify the ones relevant to you, or can that can be tweaked to work best for you. Besides regular marketing and paid Ads, organic visibility is a more preferred approach. It works best for longtime commitments and saves a lot of money that could flow off in paid approaches.
Use paid promotions but do not overdo them. They are not cheap. Look out for as many organic ways to gain visibility, which will be a boon in the long run.
[Main photo: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]
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A marketing professional with expertise in strategies to engage customers and improve business opportunities. Interested in marketing communications and like to keep abreast of new trends and developments.