The Intersection of Social Media and Retail Sales

 | Updated on: December 28, 2023

Social media marketing has become extremely important for businesses today. Why? Because more than 75% of the world’s population aged 13+ is on social media. This number signals that businesses can tap into this wide pool of potential customers should they build social media presence.

According to recent studies, at least 54% of people review or look for products on social media before buying them. Some of these users already have a brand in mind and follow its social media accounts many times a day to look for new arrivals.

While social media marketing is a part of all  modern businesses, it is extremely important for retail brands. If you own a retail business, this marketing media can help you improve your customer engagement, increase your brand’s visibility and convert interested people into customers. Whether you own an online store or a brick-and-mortar store, or are omni-channel, you need to follow all the best practices for social media for retail.

Making social media a vital part of your sales process

The main concept of social media for retail is that you have to sell and promote your brand and not just your product. As a first step towards this, as a business, you must include social media  in your sales funnel. Today, most people visit the social media accounts of retail brands and buy from those brands. This is known as social commerce.

You have to set up your own social commerce solutions on your social media accounts so that customers get hooked to your brand and start buying. Why is this important? Because a large section of people make their retail purchases from social networking platforms. This explains the power of social media. It is now channeling businesses and generating revenues.

Regular customer engagement on social media channels

Social media for retail works on the concept of customer engagement. Once you create your brand’s social media accounts on different platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and more, you need to mark your presence with regular customer engagement.

Look for the queries or feedback posted on your social media to know what customers want to know or share about your products. Acknowledge the good reviews and manage the not-so-good ones. Answer customer queries promptly, and post regular videos on tutorials to use your newly launched products (if any).

Use chatbots and artificial intelligence tools to engage with customers promptly, 24/7. All of these social media for retail tips go a long way in establishing your brand in the minds of your current and potential customers.

Here is a word of caution – while frequent engagement with your audiences on social media is a good idea, you should refrain from promoting your brand too much in these engagements. Limit your content only to explaining your new products and educating people on how to use them. Don’t try to make an aggressive sales pitch out of your posts.

Using influencers in the right way

Influencers have started to dominate social media marketing trends today. If you want to know how to make the best use of social media for retail businesses, your answer lies in influencer marketing. Influencers with a significant following on social media  can endorse your products/services and help you increase the reach and visibility of your brand to a large extent.

Using advertisements to reach your target audiences

One of the best ways to use social media for retail is to advertise smartly. Your social media marketing methods can give you a list of customers interested in your products, past purchase history, and more. Using this audience research, you can post relevant ads to target these audiences increasing the chances of converting them into customers. 

You can appoint a social media marketing expert to help draw appropriate advertisement and marketing strategies suited to your target audiences based on demographics, language, purchase history and more. This way, you can spend on only those advertisements designed for your target audiences to get the best returns on your investment.

Bottom Line

Social media for retail businesses is a wonderful tool to improve brand visibility and reputation, thereby increasing sales and profitability. The key is to use effective social media marketing techniques and devise different sales strategies for different social media accounts to ensure that products/services reach the right people.

With the number of social media users growing phenomenally every single day, retail businesses should make the most of the trending social commerce solutions to boost their sales and profits.