Social media popularity can be e-sold

Buying from a friend is different. What matters is not so much a good price, but knowing that behind the products on offer is his story, hard work and great passion. This also applies to online "friends" we follow on Facebook, YouTube or Instagram. Here are the people who have used this phenomenon and social media popularity to turn it into e-business success.

By Dominik Cisoń, Customer Success Specialist of the platform Shoper.

Plenty of online sellers gain customers through social media. They usually start by setting up a Facebook page for their e-store and recommending available products on it. The more ambitious also write blogs and explore other sites, but most of them treat social media "only" as a source of additional traffic to the store. Our data shows that in the first three quarters of 2018, social media inputs were responsible for 16% of visits to stores operating on the Shoper platform.

There are retailers for whom the statistics of hits to a store from a fanpage or other pages on social networks are much higher than average. These people usually started not with self-promotion, but with creating relationships with other network users and building an authentic community based on them. It turns out that you don't have to be a TV celebrity - it's enough to talk about your passion in an interesting way to get a few or even tens of thousands of people interested in it. An online community is an excellent base for the future success of an e-store -.

Shoper took a look at how its vendors operate on social media

Facebook

Agnieszka Niedziałek's fanpage napieknewlosy.pl [48,000 fans] was originally an extension of her hair care blog. Today, its profile picture is probably the best showcase of an online store one could think of. It depicts its owner, Agnieszka, and in fact her hair - long, shiny and well-groomed. She herself is also in most of the photos published on the fanpage. In this way she promotes her store Na Piękne Włosy better than if she started listing the advantages of the shampoos and conditioners in its offer. She argues for the power of knowledge behind her passion in the tutorials she publishes on the fanpage, as well as on her own YouTube channel.

The immense passion can also be seen in Marta Nendza's videos, posted on the fanpage of her store Noski Noski [45,000 fans]. In them she presents toy novelties, and she does it in such a way that amazement at the creativity of the designers is mixed with the desire to buy these toys immediately. Not even for children but for themselves. The videos are rarely longer than three minutes, which fits perfectly with the way users use Facebook. They are recorded and edited in a professional manner, although they do not lack the spontaneous, personal touch that is so important in social media. Thanks to these features, they have tens of thousands of views each.

The choice of Facebook as the largest network in the world usually seems obvious. The site appears in our statistics as the social media from which stores get the most visits, although its advantage over the other sites is not as overwhelming as it was not so long ago. Its share of traffic from social media in January 2017 reached 94%, to melt down to 78% by September 2018 Therefore, it is worth considering supplementing Facebook activities with a presence on other sites.

Instagram

This application is used by several times fewer people in Poland than Facebook, but some influencers are the ones who gather the largest audience on this service. This usually happens when they publish content aimed at the largest group of Instagram users - young women. Such is the case on Anna Plen's profile - Ceci Bloom Botanical Art [5 thousand observers]. It is dominated by design and art in a delicate feminine style. Photographs depicting watercolors with plant motifs, which Anna paints, are not advertised here in an obtrusive way, and perfectly blend with photos of the author's daily life. Everyone can see how her works look in matching atmospheric interiors.

A similar idea - with displaying the products sold "in action" - is used by the Nancy Accessories [17 thousand observers] store, which is run by Magdalena Kucia-Ochal. A masculine technological gadget such as a smartphone is transformed into a fashionable feminine accessory thanks to tasteful cases from the store's offerings. Magda emphasizes this by posting photos shared by her Instagram users, in which the phone in its new coat becomes an essential styling element. She uses hashtags for this, thus building a community around her store.

In our comparison, Instagram lags behind Facebook, but is quickly catching up In January 2017, visits from Instagram accounted for just 4.3% of traffic coming from social media in stores on the platform, while in September 2018 this figure had already reached 16.2%.

At the same time, it is worth remembering that Instagram does not allow links outside the service in posts, but only in the profile description. This year, however, the possibility of tagging products in posts and linking your Instagram account to your Facebook account has appeared. More recently, you can also link to your store in your Insta Stories accounts. In a short period of time, the share of this service in traffic from social media to Shoper stores has increased from zero to 6.2 percent!

YouTube

Although Kasia Lisiak began her social media presence by setting up profiles of her own manufactory on Facebook and Instagram, most people follow her on YouTube, on the Mr. Lisiak channel [43,000 subscribers]. In the videos, she does not persuade people to buy her posters and pennants, but talks about the events of her life in an original and humorous way. The role of the recording studio is played by her apartment, which is also an artist's studio. Viewers gain a "behind-the-scenes" glimpse into the artist's world. Chances are that once they like her style of being, they will also like her posters.

Much more practical in nature are the videos on the Green Emergency channel [47 thousand subscribers]. Michalina Trempala together with her father Gregory give advice to beginner gardening enthusiasts. In their videos they address the most common challenges in arranging home gardens. They also regularly arrange hour-long live broadcasts in which they answer questions from viewers on a regular basis. Recently, they decided that in addition to selling gardening patents, they could also sell an assortment of products and have become the faces of an e-store they are co-founding with a friendly company.

Between January 2017 and September 2018. Youtube increased its share as a source of store visits Shoper from a mediocre 0.3% to 3.8% This is still not much, but it should be remembered, users do not treat this medium as a gateway for exploring web resources, but enter for the content available on the site itself. They can spend relatively much more time on watching videos posted on YouTube, which later translates into a much higher awareness of the brand that has been "located" in them.

Is it worth it to be everywhere?

Other social networks like Pinterest and Twitter bring Shoper stores a small fraction of the traffic, primarily because they are not popular enough in Poland. The same is true of LinkedIn, which works well as a communication tool for professionals, but not necessarily for a brand with its users. Before deciding to enter a more niche social media platform than Facebook, it is worth checking whether our target customer uses it. If not, a nice but modest profile - a business card - will probably suffice. For example, when we don't have an idea or content on Instagram, a mosaic of one professional photograph, the store's web address and a contact email will work better than randomly uploaded photos.

Remember that each social media has its own characteristics. Copying 1:1 posts from Facebook to Instagram usually doesn't work. You need to arrange different types of posts on each site. This way we give fans a reason to follow us on several channels.