If you’re looking to acquire a customer base for your online business, you need to go where the people are. With billions of active users from all around the world, social networks seem to be one of the best places to find and acquire customers to your business.

Brands have already started leveraging social media to acquire customers. Dell Inc has been making million dollar sales per year using Twitter alone and companies like Uwheels have been making use of its social influencers to make million dollar sales.

What are the things these companies are doing right? What are you missing? How would you use the social networks to generate more sales? This post will answer all of these questions.

1. Start a storefront on Facebook

Using social apps like Shopify, you can instantly turn a tab of Facebook page into an ecommerce store. All you need to do is to install an ecommerce app on your Facebook page, start a storefront, start adding products and began selling.

Almost every popular hosted shopping platform such as Shopify or BigCommerce etc. allows you to start a storefront on Facebook as well. Choosing such popular ecommerce app is a great choice especially if you’re already running a storefront on your website or if you’re planning to start a storefront on your website as well. The best thing is that you can seamlessly work both on your website and Facebook without using any other third party app.

When it comes to choose an ecommerce platform, there are a lot of choices. Since each shopping platform has its own pros and cons, it becomes harder to decide on which platform you should choose. To get an idea, you may use recommendation engines like WebAppmeister, which can help you find the best suited ecommerce app for your business goals and needs.

Alternatively, if you’re not in the ecommerce business, you might not want to add a storefront on your website. In such cases, you can look for an app that lets you easily add a storefront on Facebook.

Here are a few apps you should consider using.

• Storefront Social: Storefront Social can be a perfect option for you if you’re getting started with selling on Facebook. You can test drive the app 7 days, and then it will charge you $9.95 per month.

• StoreYa: StoreYa is one of the most popular shopping apps for Facebook. It also allows you to integrate with other popular platforms such as Magento, eBay and Woocommerce, etc.

  The free plan of StoreYa provides you access to the coupon pop-up feature only. The premium plans starts from $9.99/month.

Is it for you: Though the idea of adding a storefront seems like an easy way to sell products on Facebook, the truth is that it isn’t as easy as it sounds to be. In fact, selling on Facebook is best suited for certain industries such as photography, sports, pet supplies, dropshipping, etc.

Example: Facebook store by Lego watches and clocks: Lego Watches are well known watch brand for kids. The Facebook store of Lego Watches is powered by Storeya app.

You can visit the Lego watches and clocks Facebook’s store here.

2. Start remarketing on social networks

Remarketing is one of the most prominent ways to sell your products and services on Facebook. It is also widely used for retaining existing customers and enticing potential customers to engage with the brand, so they may become a customer in the near future.

Remarketing allows you to advertise specifically targeting people who have previously visited your website or shown an interest in your product.

Here are a few ways how remarketing can be used.

1. Customer acquisition: If a potential customer shown an interest in your product but left without purchasing, you can retarget him on social networks in order to encourage them to purchase your product. While remarketing, another tactic is to offer a limited time discounts to them, which can help creating a sense of urgency to buy your product.
2. Customer retention: It is a well known fact that selling products to your existing customers is easier than acquiring new customer. If your customer has previously purchased from your product, chances are he might be interested in purchasing again. In fact, as customer retention is much cheaper, remarketing to your existing customers will even help increasing the overall ROI of your business.
3. Announcement: For instance, if you’re offering a special discount or conducting an event and some of your existing customers haven’t visited your website for a while, chances are he might not be aware of the new event. Remarketing those customers can help spreading the word easily.
4. Increase brand loyalty: Not every customer will be loyal to your brand. In fact, most first time customers are in the process of filling a need rather than engaging with your brand for long term. Enticing your first time customers to engage with your brand on social media can help making them loyal to your brand. The best thing about building loyalty among your customers is that loyal customers are more likely to turn as your brand advocates.

Is it for you: Unlike adding a storefront, remarketing is not limited to any industry. Even if you’re in the B2B industry, you can target your potential customers by remarketing on social sites.

Example: Here’s an example of a remarketing ad. Codeable.io is targeting me because I’ve previously visited their website but haven’t signed up yet for hiring a WordPress expert. This ad is focused on explaining their unique features of the service such as money back guarantee and high customer rating etc. This ad might help users who didn’t understand the features of their service during the first visit.

Here’s another example.

Desk Time is an app that lets you track time you spend while working. It used to retarget me on Facebook since I’ve not completed the registration. The best thing is that they know precisely that on which phase of the conversion funnel I belongs to and the ad copy is tailored around it in order to entice me to finish the registration.

3. Make your followers engaged with your brand

Loyal social media followers are brand advocates who are most likely to recommend your products to their friends. That said, always remember that at its core, social media is a sharing platform. So it is better not to look like a spammer by solely promoting your own stuffs on social sites. Rather whenever you share things make sure you add value to your followers.

A nice approach is to follow 80/20 rule when sharing your content. That is, in every five things you share, you can include one promotional story or content. Remember, your ultimate social media strategy should be to build relationship with your followers, so they become your loyal customers.

Is it for you: Not all social networks are best suited for every business, so it is critical for your marketing success that you choose the right platform and create a strategy accordingly. If you’re not sure which platform you should focus on, here are a few ideas…

• Facebook: Best for B2C brands and brands with visually driven products
• Twitter: Publications, B2B brands and B2C brands that involve home & garden, gift & specialty, etc.
• YouTube: Ecommerce and visually driven brands
• Pinterest: Fashion, ecommerce and brands that target females
• Google +: B2B brands and brands that target male professionals
• LinkedIn: B2B service providers, recruiters

Example: Grammarly does a fairly good job in engaging social media users with their brand. They are very consistent in producing regular high quality posts to their social profiles.

What I really liked about their social media content is that even when they share promotional content, they make sure it actually adds value to their followers and it doesn’t look like a promo. Here are a few things you can learn from Grammarly’s social media strategy.

• Ask questions: asking questions to your followers can increase the engagement rate.
• Images: Use high quality images that are optimized for each social site and make sure you follow the same branding standards while sharing any images.
• Don’t replicate: Each social network is different. What works well on Facebook, may not work well on Twitter, so Instead of replicating the same content on all the platforms, curate content specifically for each platform, which helps building more engagement.

You can visit the Grammarly’s Facebook page and Twitter page here.

4. User generated content

Once you built a good enough follower base on social sites, you can leverage your existing follower base to grow even further.

One way to grow is by asking your loyal audience to post photos and share their experiences on social media about how your product helped them. The best thing about user generated content on a social network is that it will act as a social proof, which helps you build brand exposure as well as sales.

How would you ask your loyal audience to create content for you? Here are a few ideas.

• Create a hashtag campaign: Ask your followers to share their experiences with your product with a particular hashtag. You can share those experiences on your profile as well. According to a new research, pictures were found to increase trust among all types of consumers, so you can entice users to post photos with your product as well.
• Reward users: Rewarding users who post the content on social media. This strategy will encourage more users to participate in the campaign.

Is it for you: It is for you if you want organic sharing and building social proof. In fact, a lot of customer research studies reveal that people are more likely to buy a product if they saw a social proof. Nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.

Example: In the mid-2011, Tourism Australia invited fans and followers to take and post photos (both on Instagram and the Tourism Australia Facebook page) with the hashtag #seeaustralia or #RestaurantAustralia. The best thing is using the hashtag, the fans are still posting over 1000 photos every day.

Final takeaway

Starting a social media storefront

It has been reported that many retailers closed their Facebook store because the ROI was low. However, it doesn’t mean that F-commerce is declining. You’ll need to provide incentives to customers for shopping on Facebook platform rather than simply replicating your ecommerce site on Facebook.

Remarketing on social media

Cost per click for remarketing on social media is comparatively less than that on search engines. That is because social traffic is less targeted than that of search engine traffic. However, by using features like custom audiences on Facebook and Twitter website tags, you can improve the ROI to a great extent.

Building engagement

Tying the social media engagement with ROI can be challenging. With that said, rather than focusing solely on selling on social media focus on using social media for building customer relationships and brand exposure.

User generated content

Without a doubt, user generated content can help you build social proof. However, negative user generated content can do the complete opposite of this and negatively impact your business, so before starting the campaign think of all the ways it could go wrong and brainstorm how you can overcome the trouble even in the worst scenario.