How to Use Social Media to Increase Traffic to Your eCommerce Store

Every month, Amazon receives roughly 197 million unique visits to its website. Wal-Mart’s online store gets 127 million hits and eBay, though it comes in third in this particular race, still has 113 million unique visitors each month. Not too shabby.

While these are the top three eCommerce sites today, making them hard to beat—especially if you’re new to the eCommerce world—imagine having just one-half or even one-third of their visitors come to your site. Picture in your mind what that type of spike would do to your online sales.

Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics, explains that social media can help business owners achieve this goal because these particular platforms are “still a significant driver of traffic for websites.” So, if that is your goal, to use social media to increase traffic to your eCommerce store, here are some ways to achieve it.

Develop Effective SEO Strategies

Developing the correct social media SEO (search engine optimization) strategy can make it easier for your target audience to find and connect with you.

If SEO is a little confusing, it’s like taking a brick-and-mortar business, getting rid of the small, hard-to-see banner outside the front of the store, and replacing it with a huge sign that has a lot of flashing lights on it. Is it attention-seeking? Yes, it will turn heads and attract foot traffic into the store. SEO acts like that sign with flashing lights for your site in the online world. Most visitor traffic to sites comes from search. Optimizing your site and all its content increases traffic, and if you’ve got lead generation pages, more traffic will result in more sales.

Optimize Online Assets

To create an effective SEO plan, list your online assets and get an SEO expert to optimize them.

Know Your Customer

Then you need to get to know your audience better. When you know their likes and needs, your blog content can present information that helps and informs readers, so they grow to trust your brand.

Keywords in content

For SEO, you’ll need to include long-tail keywords (phrases they’d likely use when searching for you) so your post, and thus your site, appears higher in their search results. Remember you’re aiming for page 1 of search results.

Social Sharing Plugin

Use a social sharing plugin on your blog and share your posts to your social media profiles to pull your followers to your site. Your followers can read your blog content and use the sharing icons to share the content with their followers – this is how you can grow your site traffic from social media.

Publish Guest Posts

Because exposure is the game’s name, it also helps to publish content on other sites with links back to your online store. So, think about blogs your target market would likely read and reach out to them to see if they take guest posts.

Remember: the goal of these posts isn’t to try to sell your products. Instead, you want to share your knowledge and experience in a way that naturally compels others to want to see what you have to offer.

One way to do this is to write about common problems your target market has and ways they can overcome them. If you can slide one of your products in as a solution, outstanding. But provide other options, too, so your potential customer base sees you as someone trying to help versus just a business after their hard-earned cash.

Run Social Media Ads

One of the biggest draws of social media is totally free. Yet, you can also get further ahead faster if you pay for a few well-designed ads. How?

Either learn how to advertise on Facebook and other sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. or engage an SMM expert to do it for your business. With targeted ads on social media, you can position your eCommerce business so it appears right in the face of your target consumer.

Social media can help you generate more traffic for your eCommerce store, making you a true contender in this space when you use free and paid marketing initiatives.