Shopify Social Selling: Use Social Media to Drive Sales

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

There are a whole host of ways you can generate sales for your e-commerce business. You might try to drive traffic through targeted paid ads, or perhaps you’ll use SEO to help people find the products they need directly from search engines. Finally, you could consider setting up a Shopify social selling strategy to find new audiences, generate more sales and grow your business.

But selling on social requires a whole strategy. You need to do more than simply link to your Shopify store and ask people to buy from you. However, it’s not as hard as you initially might think.

In this post, you’ll learn:

1. Why social selling allows you to find untapped audiences
2. What social apps you should use to drive more sales to your Shopify store
3. How to successfully use influencer marketing to increase your social reach
4. The reasons why you need to sell a story and not just a product.

Let’s dive in!

Shopify social apps

There is a range of Shopify apps that enable you to increase and improve the ways you sell to your customers on social media.

Soldsie is a Shopify plugin that allows you to keep track of the sales you make, your inventory and your data on Shopify, even if you’re selling on a social media platform.

To support you further, this app allows your customers to check out on your own checkout page, keeping your branding consistent throughout the entire buying process.

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But it doesn’t stop there. Have a look at the wide variety of social media apps for Shopify stores to find the perfect one for your business.

Influencer marketing

There are people out there where social networks make up their entire business model. They often have followers reaching the 10’s if not 100’s of thousands. In many cases, they have millions of followers.

Building a large following of highly engaged followers on social media takes hard work and time, there are no short cuts. But there is a large audience on every platform and just because your social channels aren’t as developed as you’d like them to be doesn’t mean you can’t reach a wide group of potential customers.

You can tap into this audience by utilizing Influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is an effective Shopify social media strategy as it allows you to reap the benefits of social media, even if you haven’t had the chance to build up your own following.

Influencer marketing works by paying an influencer (someone with a larger social reach than you) to showcase your products on their social channels.

However, there are ways to game the system, so if it’s something you want to try, be sure to verify each influencer reach and following.

When making these evaluations, you’re looking for the following:

1. Whether their followers and brand are similar to the audience you’re trying to reach
2. How much reach they get.

In terms of relevancy, you want to make sure your motives are aligned. If you sell fishing products, it might not make sense for you to show your products on an Instagram that focusses on beauty products.

But it would make sense to focus on a social channel that showcases the best places to go fishing.

Likewise, when it comes to reaching, you don’t necessarily have to go for the account with the biggest following. Using the same example as above.

It’s better to go with a fishing influencer who has 3,000 active followers than a beauty influencer who has 3 million active followers.

A recent Buffer report highlighted the cost of using influencer marketing. As you can see you’re looking to pay around $10 per 1000 followers.

So you really want to make sure that the person you choose to use has the right kind of followers to ensure you get the best ROI on your investment.

Untapped audiences

How many people know about your store? If you’re running a fairly new Shopify store the answer is probably not many. Even if you’re established, there is always the potential to reach a wider audience.

Whatever store promotion tactics you use within your Shopify store you want to make sure you try to reach the largest number of people possible.

When you start selling on social you have access to each person on the network relevant to your niche.

For example, if you sell skin care, you might try and build a community of followers who have an active interest in their skincare routines.

In many cases, people see your products on their social channels before they’ve even heard about you. In extreme cases, they see your products and business before they even knew they wanted them.

In these situations, you’re able to organically target people who could be potential customers.

Sell a story, not a product

Even though consumers are happy to follow brands on social media, you need to understand what sort of content you should publish. If you go in with the hard sell, you’ll do the opposite of driving sales, you’ll drive potential customers away. You can avoid these social media mistakes if you use social channels to sell a story and not your products.

But what does that mean?

Well, your product listing pages are perfect for when you want to showcase high-quality images of your products along with thought-inducing captions. Your social channels, however, should be used to build a community and evoke a conversation with your customers and potential customers.

For example, on a visual social channel like Instagram, you want to make sure you have excellent product photography but don’t limit yourself to simply taking a photo of your product with a plain background.

Instead, show how your product is used in everyday life. These type of images are better storytellers than simply using photos of your products.

Chubbies a clothing brand use Instagram to drive sales and entertain their audience.

They have over 400,000 followers and you’ll notice they don’t push for the hard sell in their images. Instead, they stay on brand and create fun, share-worthy content they know their customers will love.

The use of memes works well here because Chubbies has a solid understanding of their brand and what their customer enjoy consuming online.

If your e-commerce store sells products that fall on the serious side of the spectrum, this strategy might not work for you.

It’s all about learning who your customers are and creating a story on social media that truly resonates with them.

Shopify Social Selling Final thoughts

One of the great benefits of using Shopify is the plethora of apps they have available to help you grow your business the way you want.

What’s more, when you do start using these apps and generate social traffic, you’ll have access to a whole new untapped audience who might not have previously found you.

But in order to make a success of social selling, you need to think closely about why people use social media and what type of customers you’re hoping to attract.

It all comes down to making sure you’re not just using your social channels to sell your products but sell a story instead.