How can you best merchandise on social media?

1 Know your goals

Before you start merchandising on social media, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive traffic, or boost conversions? Depending on your goals, you will need to choose the right platforms, formats, and metrics to measure your success. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you might want to use visual platforms like Instagram or Pinterest and focus on creating eye-catching and shareable images. If you want to drive traffic, you might want to use platforms like Facebook or Twitter and include links to your website or landing pages. If you want to boost conversions, you might want to use platforms that offer shoppable features like Instagram Shop or Facebook Shops and make it easy for your customers to buy your products directly from your posts.

2 Know your audience

Another key factor for successful merchandising on social media is knowing your target audience and what they expect from you. You need to understand their preferences, pain points, needs, and desires, and tailor your content and offers accordingly. You also need to know where they hang out online, when they are most active, and how they interact with your brand and your competitors. You can use tools like social media analytics, surveys, polls, or customer feedback to gather insights and data about your audience and segment them into different groups based on their characteristics and behaviors. This will help you create personalized and relevant content and offers that resonate with them and motivate them to take action.

3 Create value

One of the biggest challenges of merchandising on social media is standing out from the crowd and capturing your audience's attention. You can't just post product photos and descriptions and expect people to buy from you. You need to create value for your audience and show them how your products can solve their problems, improve their lives, or fulfill their aspirations. You can do this by using storytelling, testimonials, reviews, tutorials, demonstrations, or comparisons to highlight the benefits and features of your products and how they can help your customers achieve their goals. You can also use social proof, scarcity, urgency, or discounts to create a sense of trust, desire, and FOMO (fear of missing out) and encourage your customers to buy now.

4 Optimize your content

Once you have created valuable content for your audience, you need to optimize it for each social media platform and format. You need to follow the best practices and guidelines for each platform and ensure that your content is consistent, coherent, and compatible with your brand identity and voice. You also need to use high-quality images and videos, catchy captions and headlines, clear calls to action, and relevant hashtags and keywords to make your content attractive, engaging, and discoverable. You can use tools like Canva, Lumen5, or Headline Analyzer to create and improve your content and test different variations to see what works best.

5 Engage your audience

Merchandising on social media is not a one-way communication. You need to interact with your audience and build relationships with them. You can do this by responding to their comments, questions, and messages, asking for their feedback and opinions, inviting them to participate in contests, giveaways, or polls, or creating user-generated content campaigns. You can also use social media tools like live videos, stories, or reels to create more authentic and spontaneous content and showcase behind-the-scenes, sneak peeks, or customer stories. By engaging your audience, you can increase your reach, loyalty, and advocacy, and turn your followers into fans and customers.

6 Track and measure your results

The final step of merchandising on social media is tracking and measuring your results and evaluating your performance. You need to use the right tools and metrics to monitor and analyze your social media activities and how they relate to your goals. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or Shopify Analytics to track and measure your traffic, conversions, sales, revenue, or ROI (return on investment) from your social media channels. You can also use tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or Buffer to track and measure your engagement, reach, impressions, or sentiment from your social media posts. By tracking and measuring your results, you can identify what works and what doesn't, and optimize your social media merchandising strategy accordingly.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?