Social media can be a huge marketing tool for your ecommerce business. If used correctly, social media can make a rapid improvement in your business. For anyone who is starting their social media journey, making a good first impression is vital because you only have one chance to make things right. Making mistakes at the start can lead to losing potential conversions and also ruining your reputation within the social media community.

2 years ago, I struggled with growing my past ecommerce business through social media because I did not have the right strategies in mind. I was eventually able grow my company’s Instagram account to 10,000 followers within the span of 8 months, but realistically I could have achieved this number of followers in a shorter amount of time. Within the first 3 weeks of creating our new Eleyae Systems Instagram and Twitter accounts I have been able to see a 2x improvement in engagement, impressions and followers within each week. Here are some of the struggles I had in the past and different strategies you could use so that you can start your social media journey the right way.

The Struggle

The previous company I owned was called The Liquor Locker, which was mainly involved in the cannabis industry. My partner and I handcrafted pipes from alcohol bottles and made most of our revenue from online purchases. When creating our Instagram, I did not know where to start. These are the two strategies I tried:

#1: Posting Pictures of our Products and Deals

This lead to very little engagement rates. Our average engagement rate per post ranged from 4-7%. This meant that for every 100 people who saw our post, less than 8 people were liking or commenting on our pictures. I made the mistake of shoving our products in the face of our followers without providing them any value. Too much self-promotional content will hurt your social media account in the long run.

#2: Following Several Accounts

I researched certain accounts that were related to our industry and followed them hoping that they would follow us back. This strategy proved to be more of a hassle than a benefit for our company. The return rate of followers was insufficient, I would only receive 8-10 new followers for every 100 accounts I would follow.

With these novice mistakes I only saw a 20% increase in both followers and engagement within a 3-month span. My following count had only increased from 332 to 415 from the end of December until February.

These are the Correct Strategies

I was able to learn from my past struggles and implement these new strategies into our new Eleyae Systems social media accounts I created only 3 weeks ago. Since implementing these new strategies during week 2, our followers on Instagram have increased from 163 to 402 and our Twitter following has increased from 103 to 272 within only a week.

#1: Organically Grow your Audience

You can increase the social proof of your business by increasing the amount of comments you have throughout your posts. Another way to do this is by researching your industry and implementing organic growth strategies. Organic growth is just another phrase for interacting with the community. I did this by finding users and posts that relate to our industry through hashtags. For example, if you are involved in the fashion industry certain hashtags such as #instafashion or #fashionblogger are perfect to target. Like and comment on these pictures so that more people become aware of your page. Not only does the user who posted the picture see your comment, but so do all of their followers. When users start to engage with your posts by commenting you should always reply back in the comment section. This shows the community that you have a personality and your accounts purpose is not purely transactional. Organic growth strategies have steadily increased our impression rates by 100+ per week, pictured below.

#2: Provide Value to the Community

It will prove to be very difficult to gain followers if you don’t provide them any value. You can do this through story telling or maybe just informing users about something new that they don’t already know about. Not only will users find information and stories more interesting, but this will also increase the amount of engagement your post will receive. Interesting facts or information will have users leaving questions or maybe reactions in the comment section of your pictures. Once I started to post more information that provided value to our followers, our average engagement rate per post increased to about 35%.

#3: Increase Your Legitimacy

Establishing yourself as a legitimate business is the most important point to focus on if you want to translate social media engagement to revenue. No one wants to purchase a product from a company that they don’t trust. It was not until last week, when we created our website with linkable content, that we started to see our Instagram profile visits increase from 55 to 178. Creating a well-designed website will work wonders for your social media accounts because it will show users that you own a legitimate business.

Now Take Action

Now that you know these strategies, you can start your social media journey the best way possible. Provide value to the community so that users will have a reason to engage with your post and follow you. Increase your social proof in order to show that you are not a purely transactional business. Establish yourself as a legitimate business so that consumers can trust you. Learn from our struggles and use these strategies so that you can garner more followers and engagement as fast as possible.