Samantha Argos, Square eCommerce Product Marketing Lead
Sam Argos is the product marketing lead on Square's eCommerce team. She focuses on helping sellers take the lift out of marketing and grow their online sales.
The following is a transcript from an interview between Square and Sam Argos. It has been edited for length and clarity.
For many business owners, social media is not only a place to connect with customers but for customers to connect with each other. As consumers adopt new ways of discovering your business and making purchases, how can you meet them where they are?
Sam: Social media has drastically changed the way we all interact with one another and the way small businesses build relationships with their customers...even how they sell their products and services. Today more than ever a social media presence is a necessity.
So Instagram has 1 billion, monthly active users which makes it the third-largest social platform. That's behind Facebook and YouTube. Its content is inherently so visual, and scrollable. Instagram offers many different content types for posts. First, would be feed posts, these are images or videos that live on your feed permanently. Stories are those shorter bite-sized pieces of content that are really available only for a limited time. Then finally there are Reels, which are Instagram's newest post type. Whenever a platform launches something new, they really prioritize it heavily in its algorithm, which means that using that new feature will help you show up more in your followers' feeds and will help you drive follower growth. Square actually has an integration with Facebook and Instagram so that you're able to sync your product catalog and then tag items in your feed posts as "shoppable" and if you're a restaurant or a services business, you can include "order food" or "book now" buttons in your profile and in your stories that drive directly out to your online site to drive online food orders or appointment bookings.
I'll dive into TikTok next. TikTok recently hit 1 billion monthly active users and is one of the fastest-growing social platforms out there. It caters to a younger audience on average but they are seeing growth across many demographics right now. You can display a shopping tab on your TikTok profiles so that your followers can see all of your items at once.
The third and final one I'll highlight is Facebook. Facebook is still the largest social platform globally. It has 2.9 billion monthly active users and you should consider your Facebook business page as sort of a one-stop source for customers and followers to learn about your business. It almost acts like a secondary website for your customers to get information and decide whether they want to purchase from you.
Are there some best practices when you're first starting to explore selling on social media?
Content strategy is the most important thing. Customers rely on your social platforms and the content that you post as a way to understand the professionalism, legitimacy, and culture behind your brand - what makes you unique. Having great content that is visually appealing, caters to what your customers are looking for, and comes across as authentic is the baseline for driving organic interest in your brand and organic sales. From there social media offers you the opportunity to drive awareness that your physical location or your online site exists. You want to make sure to optimize your social channels, including links, or your address and location information within all of your posts. That's everything from the links and the information in your bio to making sure that you're tagging your location or including your site link and your product links in your posts themselves.
You can sync your catalog from square or from any e-commerce platform you partner with, over to channels to create shoppable posts, and linking integrations. It is a great way to make sure that everyone that's viewing your content also has the opportunity to easily purchase the items that are featured in that content. Lastly, I would touch on advertising. Once you feel like you have mastered that organic content strategy and you're seeing a lot of engagement, advertising can be a great way to tap into the powerful targeting capabilities of these platforms. So you can target based on demographics, based on different interests, and find new followers and potential customers that don't already know about your brand and don't already follow you, based on their interests. Attracting them and driving new customers by putting a low bit of paid spend behind your posts and testing into that ad strategy as well.
Are there a few strategies business owners are using to gain traction on social media?
Sam: Shopping features on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok cater really well to retail sellers because as a finished good item (and retail sellers often offer shipping, across the country, or globally) you're able to use those types of posts to try to go viral, attract a new audience, and offer your items to them. Some ways to drive excitement from social, as well as your other marketing channels, to your online site are around the items themselves. You can run countdowns to a drop of a new item and represent that on your site as well as on social. Or you can even think about offerings that are more targeted to the type of audience that you see on a certain platform and test the engagement you see around specific items there
One example I'll mention is called Amityville Apothecary. After building up a following of over 160,000 followers on TikTok and 15,000 followers on Instagram, the owner Dina began live selling in a consistent cadence. She does this every Friday evening for three hours at a time so that her followers always know when to expect it and when to tune in live. With those, she offers a 15% discount on all live sale orders to add that extra incentive around purchasing during the three-hour live. This is just one thing to keep in mind as something that's starting to trend and consumers are getting more and more used to that live selling aspect of social media.
Whether you run a retail business, or restaurant, or offer services - consider how your business may benefit from utilizing social media.
Sam: It's becoming more and more important that businesses prioritize social as a way to connect. This is already a place where your current customers and your potential customers are spending so much of their time. I know it can be overwhelming since there are so many social platforms but with a little research upfront, you can discover which ones are the places where there is already a lot of engagement happening around your brand, around the types of offerings you have, and hone in and just start testing.