In this lesson today we’re going to talk about social media for your ecommerce store now setting up social media is pretty easy to do I mean we’ve all done it before for our own site it’s pretty much the same for a business site but doing it properly and learning what the post and how to engage with your audience well that’s the key. So you can figure out how to grow your social media following and ultimately be able to sell more things through your ecommerce store. So let’s get started right now first off with social media we’re going to talk about in this lesson Facebook we’re talking about Pinterest YouTube Twitter and of course Instagram we’re talking about some more as well at the end of this video but those are probably the main ones I think right now snapchats another one that’s growing a pretty big following but it’s not as friendly for e-commerce store owners though we’ll talk about that later in this video.

So don’t worry about that but let’s dive into it like I said a bunch of other platforms will go into later. So why should you set up social media that is a question that I get a lot is like you know I’m trying to sell stuff on my e-commerce site why should I go set up a Facebook or other social media well a lot of reasons the first thing is social proof do you really want to buy from a store that only has  followers on Facebook or doesn’t even have a Facebook page at all no but if you go to the store and they have , followers on Facebook there’s no worry about giving them your credit card ‘coz you know this is an established credible business the next thing is customer outreach being able to interact with customers. So maybe someone buy something from you and they complain about it on social media it gives you a chance to tell them hey I’m sorry about your problem I’d like to make it right with you. So another thing to talk about is customer acquisition now this is probably the real number one reason that you want us to you want to start social media for your ecommerce store is getting new customers in the door. So when you have social media for instance Instagram a great place to get new customers I have a friend that’s doing a hundred thousand dollars revenue a month based on his Instagram alone yeah. So that’s pretty exciting.

So it’s a good way for you to get out there and meet new customers I get around currently thirty people a day coming from Pinterest to my website some of them you know ready to buy ready to pull out that credit card. So it’s a good way to expose people to your ecommerce store the next thing is backlinks now if your google and this website doesn’t have any link from Facebook no link from twitter or Instagram or anything it’s probably not going to be a very important site but if it has a link from Facebook and a link from twitter and a link from you know YouTube all these different things pointing to it you know that it’s an important site if your google. So you hit those backlinks and some of those might be no follow links which we talks about in yesterday’s lesson but still it’s important to get those backlinks and it’s a little bit more credibility that you’re telling Google that you have your website has. So the next question to ask yourself is great I’m going to set up all these different sites what should I post and in just a second I’m going to go we’re going to go one by one and talk about each of the different social media platforms but as far as what you should post it’s relatively similar for all the different sites and what I mean by that is you want to have a great looking contact your content you want to have native looking content you want to have content that looks like some something that one of their friends might post now this varies from platform to platform. So what a normal-looking posts on Instagram is very different than what a normal looking posts on Facebook or Twitter looks like and we’ll talk about each of the different platforms and how to do that but you want it to look as native as possible.

So it doesn’t look like an advertisement because if you post something it looks like an advertisement people automatically ignore it I mean you do this every day when you’re driving by and you see billboards you kind of ignore them because it’s like an it’s an ad I it’s called ad blindness all actually the next thing is you want to look at your competitors see what they’re posting see what your most important and your biggest competitors are posting if someone has a hundred thousand followers on Pinterest and there are competitor of yours see what they’re doing see what’s working and try to reproduce it for yourself I recommend a tool called buzz sumo and get a free trial and you can look up what your competitors most successful posts have been and then you can use that to create your own poles posts or just copy them straight up however you want to do it another thing you should do is check out Jab Jab Jab right hook it’s a book by Gary Vaynerchuk and in it he talks a lot about you know creating native look content and how to do it properly great book I could probably do a whole  minute talk just on this book but basically i’ll try to condense down some of that information from this book into this lesson right here. So let’s go one by one we’ll start with Facebook and Facebook is the king of social media with 1.44 Billion users it’s pretty impressive there are they are the king of social media. So you need to have a Facebook on this platform images and videos do really well. So if you have some videos that you can post I recommend doing it to Facebook also if you have some images also do it never do just plain text posts they do very poorly another thing to keep in mind with Facebook is organic reach is very low. So I don’t recommend spending a lot of time really on your Facebook on trying to like spending a lot of time on the individual post it’s probably a waste your time because let’s say you have, followers on or likes on Facebook maybe only one percent of the people will actually see your ad your posts i should say.

So if that’s Facebook let’s move on to oh and also the demographic Facebook it’s pretty much everybody is on Facebook. So it’s not exactly niche down like some of the other sites will talk about are. So Pinterest is really good for women especially but some people would argue with me and say that it’s also good for men as well like the men will actually use Pinterest but if you have a demographic that women or if your demographic for your ecommerce site is something that women would respond really well to you probably want to spend a little bit of time on Pinterest but the way the pitchers works just. So I can explain this for you is people pin things to boards but they want to save. So for instance my sister’s going to be getting married soon she is a wedding board and in that she might see an image for something like a centerpiece that she wants to make for her wedding and she’d pin that pin that image to her board and it gets saved now some of the other things to keep in mind it’s really good for products which if you’re an e-commerce store obviously you’re selling products it’s also really good for DIY stuff. So I sell dance clothing on my main ecommerce website and what we do is we have long pins where we show people how to DIY dance costumes i recommend the pins should go to an email capture. So when someone clicks on one of those images it should go to somewhere where you capture their email once again as we talked about the demographic for Pinterest is definitely women it’s much more women on this social media platform then there are men. So if you’re for instance selling up something that’s geared towards men like maybe work boots Pinterest might not be the best option for you though it very well might be maybe you realize that women tend to buy their husband a lot of work boots for instance.

So you want to cater to them there are some exceptions than some men do say that the demographic of men is rising on Pinterest I don’t buy it I personally if I was selling something geared towards men I would not advertise or I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on Pinterest the next one is YouTube and on YouTube obviously videos is what YouTube has and videos are really great for creating that human connection right now you’re watching this and it’s a YouTube video and you’re a lot more connected to me than if it was just a picture of me talking about the  best ways to use social media like if it was a Pinterest pin or it was a Facebook post it’s not is engaging and it’s not as it’s not creating that human connection where YouTube is able to do this.

So I recommend for a lot of products creating a YouTube channel it also has great SEO value it’s much easier to rank a video high up in google than it is an article and the reason for this is if someone’s searching for something like how to DIY a dance costume they don’t necessarily want to read a long article some people do but a lot of people want to watch a video and there’s a lot less competition in the video realm most people are pretty comfortable sitting back hiding behind their computer and writing an article very few people are willing to get in front of a camera and actually create a video it takes a lot more work to be honest too. So it’s a good way for you to get a leg up on the competition another thing is like I said it’s great for creating a human connection these videos and you that’s one of the big things with your ecommerce store you want to do you want to create a human connection. So that people want to buy from you.

So they don’t want to buy from amazon. So they want to buy from you and the demographic for this is pretty much everybody but there’s a lot of younger people I feel like you YouTube is growing in popularity for the younger demographics as well. So Twitter is not one of my favorite ones for e-commerce the key with twitter is you’re able to write out little text snippets they can be up to characters it does have some cool advantages images also do really well but it doesn’t have as much value for marketers anymore a long time ago a lot of people did use it for marketing now I don’t think it’s as valuable for marketers. So I’d steer clear a little bit from this one but one of the things it’s really good for is reaching out to influencers. So maybe you own a dance clothing company like I do and there’s someone that has a very popular dance blog and you can try sending them an email but a lot of times people don’t check their email or they get.

So many emails that they’re just going to ignore it but people for whatever reason tend to respond more often on Twitter. So it’s a good way to reach out to influencers next up is Instagram and Instagram is great it’s nothing but photos. So there’s no text that you need to write though you do want to use hashtags I’ll explain in a second it’s a little bit hipper than Facebook Facebook’s for the older generation Instagram is definitely for the younger generation. So you’ll find that people on Instagram are there they’re just they’re younger I mean that’s easier to say they’re more hip. So there’s that and it’s also good for a new customer acquisition.

So if you’re looking to get new customers to your website Facebook is probably not a great one twitter is probably not a great one Pinterest is actually pretty good but I’d say Instagram might be one of the best ones out there and one of the things to do is. So you’re sure you’re going to post a photo but what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to put a lot of hashtags with the photo and what people might search for they might search for hashtag. So I might have a photo of a dance costume and I’d say hashtag dance then people would search for dance on Instagram to see all the dance related pictures they’d come and they’d see my picture and then what would happen is they’d want to be like hmm where do i get this dance costume oh I can get it from be dance where it’s a little bit more complicated than that that’s the really simple version the other thing that people do is they go to other Instagram people’s profiles comment on their pictures like their pictures and follow their Instagram channel and then what happens is people will follow you back it’s called like a follow back basically. So those are some ideas for you only get one length you get the one link in your profile which kind of stinks I mean compare that to Facebook where each post you’re able to add links same thing with twitter each post you’re able to add links same thing with YouTube is well and with Pinterest and Pinterest in fact each photo is its own link there’s. So much more information on all these different platforms especially Instagram and if you want to find out more about all these check out my e-commerce course the k e-commerce profit plan I dive in deeper to all these but some other things to keep in mind actually before we move on excuse me the demographic for Instagram is definitely like I said a younger demographic I want to take a second though to talk about the other platforms the other social media platforms that are out there and one of them is vine and what buying is is six second little videos that loop around. So that’s one that you can do and not a lot of marketers are using this one yet. So maybe you want to get creative and figure out how you can use that the next one is LinkedIn we all know about LinkedIn it’s more for business stuff. So if you have a bb e-commerce business definitely check out LinkedIn on top of that we have read it and read it is basically forms where people have you know long conversations and then there’s subedits about different topics. So you can you can basically become the expert on a sub reddit there’s a lot of different strategies for this what I might do is go to the dance sub reddit and every time someone has a DIY dance costume related question well I wouldn’t do this I’d have my mom do but you could answer their questions and you could help them out and. So by becoming the expert you can like get more traffic back to your website there’s other ways to use read it as well snapchat like I said snapchats growing it’s going to be the next big social media platform get on it while you can now and what snapchat is you can take a picture and it’s a fleeting picture. So if I take a picture of something and I might send it to a friend of mine and friend would get it and they can only look at it for like four or five seconds up to seconds a lot of big advantage of the snapshot I could spend a whole video talking about that some other ones are periscope and what periscope is live video. So if I pull out my phone and I can start Periscoping right now and I could stream live to people.

So maybe I am walking around a new city and I could show people at the new city looks like or I could do a tour of my house a lot of different ways you could do parrot use periscope for your ecommerce store google plus not quite as popular with most people there are some SEO advantages of google plus i won’t get into too much right now but google+ is one you’ve probably should at least set up i recommend at least setting it up i wouldn’t spend too much time on their though and Tumblr it’s like a blogging platform it’s specifically it’s more artsy it’s used with younger women especially. So you might want to check that one out as well. So these are most social media platforms there’s always new ones there’s always like new ones coming out and you want to try to be one of the first people any time there’s a new social media platform coming out if you can be one of the first established people or brains on that new social media platform you’re likely to do really well. So keep an eye out for new social media platforms constantly and once again before I end it I just want to remind you check out the k ecommerce profit plan this is my ecommerce course it basically has everything i know about e-commerce at least the beginning stages of e-commerce in this course and i really teach you how to go from just an idea to making  thousand dollars a year profit from your e-commerce business and you know I think twenty five thousand dollars profit is it’s a good little extra chunk of change it’s not necessarily enough to quit your job but it’s enough to get the ball rolling. So check out that course if you want to learn how to start an e-commerce company.