8 eCommerce Social Media Marketing Trends You Need to Know

If you run an eCommerce store, then you’re almost certainly on social media. 

While you understand that social media is an important place to find new customers and engage with your audience, are you doing enough with your channels to boost sales?

Social media offers lots of potential for online retailers, and far too few stores actually make full use of all the possibilities. 

So, to help you get more value (and sales) from your social media channels, here are some of the biggest and best social media trends that eCommerce stores should look into right now.

Let’s dive in.

1. More eCommerce Stores Are Using TikTok to Sell

If you’ve followed any news or guides about social media, then you know that TikTok is where it’s at. With over 1.53 billion monthly active users, TikTok has become a social media giant. And its growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. 

While TikTok being a popular channel may not necessarily be new, the opportunities it offers eCommerce businesses are developing. Most notably, this is seen through TikTok’s shopping feature. 

eCommerce merchants can integrate their product catalog with TikTok. This is an awesome social media strategy to use, as it lets you promote and sell products directly from the social media app. Instead of having to direct users to your online store, they can discover and purchase products without leaving TikTok. 

This makes TikTok a powerful channel for eCommerce businesses.

eCommerce stores can promote products through appealing content, tag the product, and direct users straight to a product page. It’s a simple strategy, but it can work wonders for boosting impulse buys. 

2. Social Selling Demands Grow

Social selling, or social commerce, platforms have really taken shape over the last few years. This is a major trend in eCommerce social media marketing, and it’s something we will see a greater focus on in the near future. 

As we’ve just established, TikTok’s in-app shopping experience is big business. The platform has also introduced an advertising format called Spark Ads, which can help online sellers boost their content on the platform. 

There are shoppable Stories on Instagram, which you can easily create with a sticker. Product tagging on Instagram was previously only available to certain creators and brands. Now all users can access it. 

If your brand has a strong presence on Instagram, then this is a great way to boost sales and awareness around your products. 

While your online store will still be your most valuable asset for selling, why not expand your sales tactics to different social media channels? It’s an easy way to provide more selling opportunities and streamline your social media promotion efforts. You keep your audience on the app while still giving them the chance to make a purchase. 

The more ways you can use social media to drive direct sales, the better. 

3. UGC Is More Essential Than Ever, and It Looks Different

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most powerful forms of social media content. It’s a valuable form of social proof, and it can help eCommerce brands generate a lot more authentic interest in their products. If you want to create trust and drive sales through social media, you’ll need to try to tap into UGC as much as possible. 

Traditionally, UGC has been when people on social media mention brands, which the brand reposts. While this type of content is still valuable, Gen Z has a different idea of what UGC means. 

According to Hootsuite, Gen Z now sees UGC as social media posts produced by freelance marketers or micro-influencers for businesses. This means brands pay “UGC creators” to create UGC for them. 

Kinda sounds like influencer marketing, right? Kind of, except that these creators hand over the content to the brand instead of posting it on their channel. Here’s an example of what this could look like:

 

 

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We already know how valuable traditional UGC and influencer marketing is for eCommerce brands on social media. So, why not give this approach to UGC a try? It could help you generate a lot more positive brand awareness and trust, which is important for making sales through social media. This approach to UGC is especially important if you’re targeting a younger audience.

4. Video Is Still King

As you probably already know, short-form video has taken over social media. It’s the most engaging form of content, and thanks to unique algorithms in video channels like Instagram Reels and TikTok, you can use these videos to generate a lot more awareness and reach more potential customers.

As an online retailer, video is incredibly valuable for your social media strategy. While images can only provide so much insight into your products, video lets you display products in a much more detailed way. Users can get greater insights into how your products work, what they look like in real life, and how to use them. 

Of course, when used alongside social selling platforms, this can help you generate impulse sales through social media more easily. Just take a look at how this sponge brand uses TikTok videos to display its products and generate an audience. 

Who would have thought that a product as simple as a dishwashing sponge could generate such awesome video content and build such a massive, engaged audience?!

Never underestimate the power of video. With a few simple videos, you can boost your social media strategy way further than any images allow. Here are some video creation guides to help you capitalize: 

• 5 Quick Tips for Creating eCommerce YouTube Video Ads That Convert [+ Examples]
• 6 Quick Tips for Creating eCommerce Facebook Video Ads That Convert [+ Examples]
• How to Make Instagram Videos That Add Value to Your Brand

5. Micro-Influencers Are Still Massively Important

Influencer marketing is still a massive social media marketing tactic, and it’s only growing. And with more than 50 million influencers available online right now, your brand has endless potential to use influencers to boost sales. 

Of course, you probably won’t be chasing down expensive big-name influencers to work with, and that’s okay. Micro-influencers can actually offer your brand so much more value because they tend to have a more authentic connection with their audience. 

Using the right micro-influencer can be one of the best ways for any eCommerce brand to boost sales. It generates a valuable form of social proof, and it helps you tap into a new audience. 

Just make sure that the influencer audience matches your target demographic. To do this, you could check influencer marketplaces, search for trending posts in your niche, and see what social media accounts are prominently posting about your kinds of products. These are the people you want to target.

Finding the right influencers and working with them can be a major booster for your social media sales. 

Here’s an example of how a micro-influencer can promote brands in an authentic way.

6. Emojis, Post Length, and Posting Times Matter

If you want to get better engagement from your social media posts, then you need to optimize these posts around what performs best right now. According to a recent social media trends study:

1. 79% of social media posts contained at least one emoji
2. The average social media post is 351 characters long
3. Wednesday and Friday are the most popular days for publishing

These are just a few trends that reveal what kind of content is most popular on social media right now. 

Although it’s simple, by posting on the right day, using a long-enough caption in your posts, and simply including an emoji, your content could perform a lot better. These are easy tactics to improve your social media engagement going forward. 

7. Shopify Is Becoming More Popular — and Offers Great Social Media Integrations

The number of active Shopify stores increased by an impressive 201% between 2020 to 2022. The use of Shopify for eCommerce is becoming increasingly popular, and this is largely thanks to the platform’s ease of use and array of features. One of the most trending features is the platform’s ability to integrate with social media. 

If you’re one of the over 4.4 million websites powered by Shopify, then you should absolutely be making the most of the eCommerce platform’s social media and marketplace integrations. 

Shopify automatically syncs your products to Facebook and Instagram, so you can easily create ads or shoppable posts with your products embedded into them. You can also sync up your online store with marketplaces like eBay or Etsy to tap into a larger audience and access more selling channels. 

While there are pros and cons to using Shopify for your online store, there are many great Shopify marketing possibilities as the one we’ve mentioned. This can help you use social media more effectively for marketing your eCommerce store. 

8. Giveaways Are Still a Powerful Tactic

If you’ve seen any kind of eCommerce brand on social media, you’ve probably seen them run a giveaway. Why is this such a popular eCommerce marketing tactic for social media? Because it works!

While it may not be new, there are lots of different ways you can run social media giveaways for your business. Get it right, and it can help you generate a lot more interest and engagement through social media. The right giveaway can also help you increase sales directly. 

Here’s what you need to do to pull this off:

1. Choose the right prize. The best prizes are your products, as this will help you attract people who are actually interested in what your business offers, i.e., your potential customers. You could give away a voucher to your store or anything else related to what you sell. 
2. Choose your giveaway rules. Establish what people need to do in order to enter your giveaway and how you will choose a winner. Ideally, this would include some way to generate UGC around your online store — such as sharing your giveaway or even creating a video to enter a branded hashtag challenge. The easier you make the entry requirements, the more entries you can get. However, by adding a few extra requirements (like tagging a friend to enter), you could generate a lot more buzz around your giveaway. 
3. Set up a landing page for your giveaway. Creating a landing page for your giveaway is important, as it lets you embed an entry form where you can capture participants’ details. Now you can add these people to your CRM.
4. Promote your giveaway on the right social media channel. Make sure your giveaway makes sense for the type of content on the social media network.
5. Select the winner and notify your audience via a social media post. And send the winner an email.
6. Send a follow-up email to all participants. You’ve just generated an entire email list based on all your giveaway participants, so be sure to use it to your advantage. A great strategy is to send out an email with a small discount coupon as a consolation prize. These people have already shown an interest in your products and have your products in their minds, so a small discount could be a great way to directly boost your sales.

Conclusion

These eCommerce social media trends and strategies are all pretty straightforward to use, and they can all make a major difference to your overall social media strategy.

The important thing is to set clear goals with social media and to run your social media marketing campaigns with a clear direction. By using these trends and tactics, you can make that goal to boost sales, and there’s a good chance you’ll have a lot of success with this!

With the right tactics, you’ll soon find out just how much your social media channels can do for your online store. 

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