6 tactics to grow a social media shop

Knowing how to grow your social media shop can be tricky. To help, we’ve listed some of the best strategies to help grow your social media shop and improve your revenue. These tips should work across all social media platforms.

• Set SMART goals and objectives
• Content marketing
• Interact with your audience
• Influencer marketing
• Maintain consistent branding
• Don’t focus on the selling

Setting proper goals and objectives for your business is an important step, but it’s usually overlooked. When goals are clear and defined, you and your business become much more likely to achieve them.

In order to improve the chances of meeting your goals and objectives, they need to be SMART — but what does SMART stand for?

• Specific — clearly state the area you wish to improve.
• Measurable — use metrics to track your progress accurately.
• Achievable — only set goals that you can realistically achieve.
• Relevant — your business objectives should apply to growing your business.
• Time-constrained — a time frame gives you a deadline to work towards.

So a SMART objective for growing a social media shop could be “to increase your Instagram followers by 25% within the next six months”. This goal tells you exactly what to improve (Instagram followers), with trackable metrics (25%). By making sure your goals are SMART, they give you more direction and can help you work harder. 

Once you’ve set your business goals, you’ll need to work towards achieving your goals. Completing your objectives can be tricky, but by using SMART, they should be clearly defined and easy to follow. 

Posting at random times or having long gaps between posts can damage your content’s reach. Social media algorithms like regular content, and if you don’t stick to this you can find your content is less successful at reaching your audience. 

If you have trouble remembering to post frequently, one possible solution is to create an upload schedule. Having a written plan for your content can help you keep track of when you last posted, and help improve your social reach and interaction. If you’re interested in other methods of content marketing, we suggest checking out our other articles. 

It doesn’t matter which platform you’re on: the more you engage with your audience, the more it’ll grow. Try posting content that your audience feels they should respond to, like a question or an opinion. Not only does this make your audience feel important to your social profile, but it tells the platform that you are a person of interest.

Responding directly to followers is a great way to increase engagement and usually leads to larger conversations. The more involved you are with your followers, the more they’ll care about you as a creator. Direct interaction is a great tactic for newer accounts, but it becomes less viable the more your following grows. 

You can also improve your follower engagement by occasionally posting a different type of content. Offering giveaways or competitions, for example, where people have to like, comment, and share to enter can boost short-term engagement. 

Giveaways frequently happen across various social media platforms, and are a great way to boost short-term engagement. The Longest Johns gave away a fretless bass, and the post reached over 600 likes — their posts typically range between 50 and 100 likes.

An influencer is someone with an established social media presence. There are several different classes of influencers, depending on the amount of followers they have. We’ve included an approximate follower count below:

• Nano influencers (1k-10k)
• Micro influencers (10k-50k)
• Mid-tier influencers (50k-500k)
• Macro influencers (500k-1m)
• Mega influencers (1m+)

Businesses then pay these influencers to promote certain products or places, tempting their followers to make a purchase. As a small business owner, you’re most likely to get the best return from approaching micro-influencers. 

If you want to use influencer marketing, it’s important to focus on the influencers in your niche. By finding and contacting these influencers, you can show your products to people who are already interested in similar products. If you sell cleaning supplies, for instance, approaching a cleaning account like @lynsey_queenofclean could be an effective method of growing your social media shop.

Running and maintaining several social media pages can be challenging, but all your pages should keep a similar theme. When businesses have wildly different designs for each social media platform, visitors will struggle to know if the company is genuine or not. 

If a customer isn’t sure if your business is genuine, they are likely to lose confidence and may stop their purchase. By keeping your branding consistent across your social media, you can let followers know that your accounts are genuine. Penguin Books, for instance, have got the same profile image and user handle on Twitter and Instagram. Any followers who want to interact with Penguin Books are instantly reassured.

This point might seem counterintuitive, but for social media you don’t want to constantly push your products. If all a follower sees is posts about the various products you have for sale, they’re going to become bored and disinterested. 

Instead, you can tempt your followers to repeatedly check your account and bond with your business by offering useful and helpful content. A general guideline is about an 80/20 split, where 80% of your content is informative or entertaining, and the other 20% is promotional. With the majority of your content engaging your followers, they are far more likely to further explore your pages and social media shop. 

If you’re struggling to stay on top of your business’ finances, you might benefit from using accounting software. The right software can show you profit and loss accounts, estimate your taxes, and even automatically categorise your business expenses.

As a combination of accounting software and a business current account, the Countingup app is uniquely equipped to help you manage your business’ financials. 

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