What’s the Best Social Media Platform for Your E-commerce Business?

In this article, we’re going to go over the three of the best social media platforms for e-commerce businesses today and tell you when and why you would want to advertise on them. 

Choosing the right platform to reach your customers is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. It can be hard to choose though, especially online, because of the huge number of options and channels we’re presented with. 

Social media can be a good starting point for a newcomer to e-commerce marketing because you’re likely already familiar with most of the platforms, and they have a set of built-in tools designed to help amateur digital marketers easily set up and measure campaigns.

That’s why we’re going to go over the three biggest, and most user friendly, platforms for you today. If you’re a more experienced digital marketer, stick around too and maybe we’ll convince you to try a new platform you hadn’t considered before.

Facebook Marketing for E-commerce Businesses 

Facebook Marketing Summary: 

• With a user base of over 2,5 Billion people, Facebook is the world’s biggest social media platform.
• This means you’re able to reach an incredible number of people. Facebook also has very sophisticated targeting features to narrow down who sees your ads. 
• However, you may not get the best quality leads or conversions from it unless your product has a fairly universal appeal. 

Facebook Marketing Demographics:

• Facebook has a huge cross-generational reach, particularly useful for targeting older people, with over 56% of people over 65 using the site in the US alone. 

Facebook Marketing Pros: 

• Relatively cheap to reach a huge and broad selection of people. 
• Lots of built-in analytics and insight tools to help manage your campaigns. 
• Integration with the Facebook Shop and Marketplace can directly boost your sales. 

Facebook Marketing Cons: 

• Not the best platform for reaching younger demographics.
• Campaigns can suffer from low conversion rates. 
• Leads may be of lower quality because of the platform’s broad appeal. 

Should You Be Using Facebook Marketing?

• You should use Facebook marketing if you have a product or service with a widespread appeal, or you’re just starting out with social media marketing, especially if you have an older target audience. Their variety of built-in tools and targeting options are great for new and experienced users alike. 
• For example:
  • If you’re selling luxury mechanical watches Facebook isn’t a good idea because it’s harder to filter your target market down to people who both are interested in them and can afford them. 
  • If you’re selling cheap quartz watches, Facebook is great because your product has a broader appeal and thus you’re more likely to reach interested people. 

LinkedIn Marketing for E-commerce Businesses 

LinkedIn Marketing Summary: 

• As the social media platform for professionals, LinkedIn guarantees higher quality leads than other platforms in B2B and more niche markets. According to them, as many as 80% of leads generated through social media come through LinkedIn. 
• This is because you can narrowly target people by their profession or company they work at, letting you reach key decision-makers or niche interest professionals. 
• They are however the most expensive social media platform to advertise on, and as a result, careful targeting and planning are essential for LinkedIn campaigns. 

LinkedIn Marketing Demographics:

• LinkedIn is a network for working professionals and as such tends to skew towards older demographics, but it still has a very wide reach of over 675 million users.

LinkedIn Marketing Pros:

• You can generate high quality, highly targeted, leads fairly quickly. 
• You can target hard to reach or niche groups based on their job titles or experience using LinkedIn’s built-in tools.
• It’s great for B2B businesses to reach the right kind of decision-makers in other companies. 

LinkedIn Marketing Cons: 

• Costs can rack up quickly. You need to be careful with your strategy to ensure you’re always making an ROI through generating quality leads or sales. 
• You can’t reach certain groups, like young people who aren’t working yet. 
• It’s less “social” than other social platforms – don’t go in expecting to connect with your consumers. 

Should You Be Using LinkedIn Marketing?

• You should use LinkedIn Marketing if you have a B2B or niche business and you have a very clear idea of who your target customer is. It excels in highly targeted campaigns designed to create high-quality leads, but you need to know exactly who you’re targeting. 
• For example:
  • An office supply company would want to advertise on LinkedIn to reach office managers and key decision-makers who can purchase from them. 
  • A clothing brand would not want to use LinkedIn ads because the cost is too high for creating lots of conversions unless they have a very niche product with high margins like medical scrubs. 

Instagram Marketing for E-commerce Businesses 

Instagram Marketing Summary

• Instagram is the second-largest platform on this list with over 1 billion users and huge popularity amongst younger people.
• It’s a purely visual platform that can work wonders to showcase the right kind of products or services in an engaging way. 
• However, because of this, it’s not suitable for all businesses. Generally, if you can’t visually showcase your business’ benefit it just won’t work. 

Instagram Marketing Demographics: 

• As mentioned previously Instagram’s user base tends to skew much younger than Facebook, with the majority of users being under the age of 35. 

Instagram Marketing Pros:

• Great for showcasing visual content like images or video. You can also integrate your product line directly into the platform via Instagram business pages (similarly to Facebook). 
• Since being acquired by Facebook, Instagram has a wide variety of ways to integrate your Facebook advertising campaign onto the platform. If you’re already using Facebook ads, it’s easy to switch over. 
• You can access Facebook’s targeting tools through Instagram for precise filtering of who you want to see your ads. 

Instagram Marketing Cons: 

• Instagram ads just don’t work for some businesses and industries where the benefit can’t be visually showcased. 
• Creating compelling visual content can be expensive and time-consuming. You also typically can’t adapt text-based content for the platform like you might be able to with Facebook or LinkedIn. 
• It’s harder to reach older people on the platform because its demographic is so young. 

Should You Be Using Instagram Marketing? 

• You should definitely use Instagram if you have a product or service that lends itself well to being visually showcased, and your target market is predominantly younger people. Other industries will vary on a case by case basis because it’s harder to make a blanket recommendation for who should use Instagram ads. 
• For example:
  • A tax firm wouldn’t want to advertise on Instagram because it’s hard to make taxes visually engaging. 
  • A makeup company, on the other hand, would want to, because they can showcase people wearing their products to generate interest.

We hope this helped you decide on the best social media platforms for your e-commerce business. If you found it helpful, check out more articles from the inSyte blog, or get in touch with us via the form below if you’d like to find out how we can assist you.