Social networks for ecommerce: How to sell on social media

Social networks are one of the most important tools for boosting ecommerce sales. Whether to advertise products or to sell them directly on those social platforms that allow this.

After all, “social selling” consists of getting the most out of social networks to increase your sales.  

As well as creating a profile and periodically updating it to generate a community of followers, you should take advantage of the power of social network advertising platforms to reach the maximum number of users.

How to promote your products on each social network

Facebook

Facebook is the quintessential social network and, nowadays, it is the one which offers the most options for ecommerce. It has a powerful advertising platform, Facebook Business Manager (from where you can also manage the advertising of your Instagram account).

In our blog, we have various articles about Facebook Ads, where we explain the most important aspects so that you can begin advertising on this platform:

Advertising on Facebook: How to Get Started – Facebook Ads Guide (Part 1)
How to use Facebook Ads targeting and succeed – Facebook Ads Guide (Part 2)
5 Tips for Designing Successful Ads | Facebook Ads Guide (Part 3)

Upload your product catalogue to Facebook

Facebook offers the possibility of uploading your product catalogue and tagging these items in your posts.  How is this useful? Among other things, it allows you the following:

• Once you have uploaded your catalogue, you can make all types of adverts, whether they are dynamic (with retargeting to different users) or traditional adverts. By having your products on Facebook, you will save a lot of time and you will be able to personalise your campaigns more effectively.
• You will be able to tag items in organic posts.

Instagram

Instagram has been growing exponentially over recent months. In fact, today, it has already doubled the number of Twitter users.

This social network is a very good option for product ecommerce, since it is less saturated with advertising and is much more visual than Facebook.  

Advertising on Instagram

Some aspects you should know about regarding advertising on this social network:

• Adverts on Instagram are one of two types: advertising format (whether it’s an image or video) or stories format (a type of post in vertical format, which is only visible for 24 hours).
• Advertising on Instagram is managed from Facebook, so you will have to link the two pages before you start to configure your campaigns.
• Instagram has introduced the possibility of tagging your products in a post free of charge.   To do this, you need to upload your catalogue to Facebook, and Instagram will import it from there.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a very interesting social network for ecommerce.  Although it isn’t as widely used as Instagram or Facebook, the figures are clear:

• The average order of sales coming from Pinterest is $50 more than the rest of the social networks.
• 93% of users who use Pinterest plan to make a purchase.

Advertising on Pinterest

• Advertising on Pinterest is not at all invasive and is usually done in the form of advertised posts. In this article we will explain more about this.
• The image format on Pinterest is different to the rest of the social networks, since they are vertical instead of horizontal.

Twitter

Of the social networks we are looking at in this article, Twitter is the least visual and, perhaps, the least suitable for product ecommerce. However, it is also true that, because there is less competition, it can be an opportunity.

It is a network based mainly on text, and on the immediacy of it.  Even so, you can create campaigns and advertise your products.

In this article we explain the basics of a Twitter advertising campaign.

What BigBuy can provide to help you

At BigBuy we provide images and videos of our products which are already in suitable formats for each social network.

You will be able to find these videos and images in the Downloads > Social networks material section of your control panel.

What resources do we offer?

• Horizontal Facebook Image: 1200 x 628 px.
• Square Facebook Image: 1080 x 1080 px.
• Instagram Image: 1080 x 1080 px.
• Twitter Image: 1500 x 600 px.
• Pinterest Image: 600 x 900 px.
• HQ Image: 1500 x 1500 px.
• Text of 120 characters that you can use as a basis for writing your posts.
• Product video of 30-35 seconds.