How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Ecommerce Brands

Social media is not just for entertainment anymore; it has evolved as an important sales channel for ecommerce businesses.

As of 2025, social commerce accounts for over 17% of global online sales for brands. Clearly, it’s an opportunity you can’t miss.

Social media platforms have introduced many shopping features that have made it easy for ecommerce brands to sell directly from the platform.

If you have started an ecommerce business and are not getting enough traffic to your store, then social media marketing is just what you need. It can help you reach a vast, yet engaged audience.

However, you will need a solid social media marketing strategy for ecommerce to get great results, and that’s what we’ll cover in this post.

What is an Ecommerce Social Media Marketing Strategy?

An ecommerce social media marketing strategy is simply how an ecommerce company plans to market itself on social media.

Your end goal may be to sell products, spread brand awareness, engage with your audience, or anything else.

It goes beyond sharing product photos. You need to:

• Choose the right social channels to target potential customers.
• Identify the types of content your ideal buyers resonate with.
• Use targeted advertising to attract attention.
• Make the most of industry trends, hashtag campaigns, giveaways, and Live sessions to build brand recall.

Why Do Ecommerce Businesses Need Social Media Marketing?

The global social commerce revenue was $571 billion in 2023, which is a big number to ignore. Moreover, 87% of sellers find social selling to be effective.

These statistics show the potential of social media for ecommerce marketing. It is a great channel to reach your target buyers.

However, there is so much competition that it is challenging to ensure your content grabs the right users’ attention and drives conversions. That’s why you need a clear strategy to promote your ecommerce products on social media.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Ecommerce

Before you start your social commerce  journey, let’s walk you through our 11-step strategy to promote your ecommerce business through social media:

1. Set Well-Defined Goals for Social Media Marketing

When creating a social media marketing strategy, the first thing you should do is set clear goals, which may include:

• Boosting brand awareness
• Engaging with your audience
• Building an online community
• Driving traffic to your site and product pages
• Promoting your products and boosting sales
• Bringing in direct orders through social selling

Or do you want to use social commerce features and have them act as alternative retail channels?

Ensure your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), not vague.

For example:

• ❌ Drive website traffic from Instagram.
• ✅ Drive 1,000 new clicks to your website from Instagram in the next 30 days.

Basically, all you need to do is define a set target and timeframe to achieve those numbers. Start on the right foot with our free social media strategy template.

Associate every goal with relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success and optimize your strategy on the go.

For example:

• Goal: Drive 1,000 new clicks to your website from Instagram in the next 30 days.
• KPIs: Link clicks and social media referral traffic

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Define who you’re targeting to ensure you create content and run campaigns that resonate with them.

Start by listing the key traits of your ideal customers, including:

• Demographics: Age, gender
• Interests
• Profession and income group
• Pain points
• Online buying behaviors
• Brand affinities

Perform a thorough social media audience analysis to identify who engages with your brand and content the most. Analyze if they match your ideal buyer persona.

Lastly, check out your competitors’ social media audiences to see which customer segments engage with their content and the best-performing content types and topics.

3. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

An effective ecommerce social media marketing strategy begins with selecting the right channels. Instead of spreading your resources thin and trying to do everything, focus on 1-3 key platforms.

The right platforms for your ecommerce business are simply the ones where your target customers are active. 

For example, according to our curated social media statistics:

• TikTok is great for younger audiences (18-24 years).
• Instagram is popular among both young and middle-aged people (18-34 years).
• People aged 25-44 years frequent Facebook.

For example, if you sell mid-age skincare products, your target audience is middle-aged, working women primarily who are conscious about their looks.

In this case, platforms like TikTok are automatically out of the picture. Instagram and YouTube will likely connect you with potential buyers for your skincare products.

However, considering demographics is not enough. You must also compare the social commerce features on various social media apps.

While Instagram lets you create a virtual product catalog, tag products, and sell directly, YouTube makes it easier to show products in action. Similarly, Facebook and YouTube are the preferred channels for product discovery.

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Select social media channels based on your target audience, goals, and content formats.

For example, to succeed on YouTube, you need to create HD-quality product explainer videos or shopping tutorials. Suppose you don’t have the in-house capabilities for video production. In that case, you might want to skip it (and stick to Instagram Reels), even though YouTube is a great platform for ecommerce social media marketing.

4. Create and Optimize Social Media Profiles

Create and optimize your official social profiles across channels. Set a clear and recognizable logo as the profile picture. Use your brand’s color palette for the logo background and banner image.

Ensure your bio or about section explains what your brand does, displays contact information, features website/ecommerce store links, and includes branded hashtags. Also mention the type of content (tips and product recommendations) users can expect from your account. 

Check out the beauty brand, Glossier’s Facebook profile as an example. It includes a link to its website, contact information, a brief intro about the company, and the brand logo as the profile picture.

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5. Find Your Unique Brand Voice and Tone

The competition is fierce on social media, regardless of your industry. Unless you offer a truly unique product or build an extraordinary brand, it’s tough to engage your potential buyers.

Using a distinct brand voice and tone in all your content across platforms will help your content stand out in the sea of content on social media. Moreover, it will help improve brand recall as people will associate your brand with your unique style and tone.

So, how can you decide on your brand voice?

Here are a few tips:

• Start by defining your brand personality. Do you want to sound formal or create fun and relatable content?
• Ensure your brand voice aligns with your brand’s overall image and personality. Define the words to use and not use, and other guidelines for your brand’s voice to make your entire team stay on the same page.
• Keep your brand voice consistent across all brand communications, whether on social media, blogs, podcasts, or anywhere else.

6. Develop a Content Plan

The most challenging part is actually creating content and finalizing a posting schedule for all social channels. It is also the most important step in your ecommerce social media marketing strategy.

Here is how to develop a content plan for ecommerce marketing:

Choose the Right Content Mix

To market your ecommerce brand and products, you should leverage various types of content, including:

• Value-based content such as tutorials, tips, industry trends, and educational posts
• Engagement-driving content such as polls, questions, contests, and giveaways
• Promotional content such as product highlights, limited-time offers, and discounts
• Storytelling, such as behind-the-scenes, team highlights, and founder stories

Don’t just promote your products and offers endlessly. People value helpful content, tips, stories, and relatable memes and videos more than product showcases.

Use a mix of different types of posting ideas to build a loyal following. Sales will come as a by-product.

Pick a Posting Frequency

Posting frequently and consistently helps you build an active social media presence. However, set realistic expectations about how much content you can create and post each week or month because it is better to post fewer times every week consistently than to post heavily one week and nothing the next week.

Filming and editing a long-form YouTube video takes more time. It is okay to post one video biweekly. You can set a higher posting frequency for simpler content like Instagram Stories.

Choose what’s comfortable for you, but stick to it. Consistency is key here. Your followers should know when to expect your content and how often you post on social media.

Create a Content Calendar

Now, create a schedule that includes what kind of content you’ll post on which day and on which platform. It will be a comprehensive plan of all your social media content-posting activities.

Here’s an example of a social media content calendar:

7. Make a Plan for Influencer Marketing

Influencers are often respected in their niches for valuable content and helpful tips and tricks. Leveraging influencer marketing strategies can get your ecommerce business and products in front of a wider target market, who are more likely to trust and buy an influencer’s recommendations.

To build an effective influencer marketing plan:

• Choose influencers whose audience aligns with the demographics of your ideal customers.
• Decide on collaboration types such as sponsored posts, giveaways, product reviews, and affiliate partnerships.
• Set clear expectations for content and performance metrics to prevent disputes, and communicate your brand guidelines, messaging, and goals in advance.
• Decide how you will track campaign performance and the most important metrics for you (likes, clicks, sales, traffic, etc.).

Influencer collaborations can help you achieve different marketing goals, from brand awareness to sales. You can even provide them with unique discount codes to track the sales that each influencer drives.

Here’s an example of influencer marketing by the watch brand Daniel Wellington. See how the influencer promotes the brand and offers a unique code to their followers to get an exclusive discount.

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8. Use Customer Reviews to Provide Social Proof

Generating a steady stream of customers is one of the biggest challenges of an ecommerce business.

The solution: Showcase customer reviews and testimonials to prove the value your products bring, build trust, and attract new customers. That’s the power of social proof. You can share these reviews on various social channels.

Pro Tip

Use SocialPilot’s review generation and marketing features to generate customer reviews and share them on social media easily. 

The review generation feature allows you to set up automated review campaigns to collect customer reviews in one go. You can create email and SMS review generation workflows tailored to specific customer journeys. Then, use the review marketing feature to share these reviews across various social media platforms.

Try SocialPilot for free!

9. Decide If You Want to Invest in Paid Advertising

Though social media advertising costs have increased over the years, it remains an affordable alternative. Ads on most social platforms, except LinkedIn, cost the same or less than advertising through Google Ads.

Here’s a comparison of the average cost-per-click for ads on various platforms:

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You can target your ads to users based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors.

For example, Meta Ads gives you complete control over who you want to see your ads. You can create custom audiences and detailed targeting rules to reach a niche audience.

Here are some tips to help you run effective social media advertising campaigns for your ecommerce brand:

• Use a mix of ad formats, including carousel, video, story, and image ads. Test them out for a bit to see which ones drive the most conversions for your brand.
• Social media platforms are visual in nature and if you want to grab people’s attention, you need to use engaging, high-quality visuals in your ads.
• Write compelling ad copy that makes people want to click on the links and buy your products or visit your store. 
• Since you’ll be using the standard “Shop Now” or “Visit the Store” CTAs in most ad formats due to a lack of space, ensure you add a strong call to action copy before the button.
• Set a test budget to try paid advertising and see if it’s driving any results. Based on your assessment, you can invest more or stop it completely. We recommend that you give it enough time before you decide either way.

10. Leverage Social Commerce Features

Most social media platforms offer social commerce features that allow direct purchases through the social app or direct customers to your store. Using these features wisely can help you establish another retail channel to boost your ecommerce sales.

Here are some social commerce features you can use:

• Set up social media shops: Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok allow you to create Shop or store pages, feature product catalogs, and let prospects make direct purchases without leaving the social app.
  

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• Use Shoppable Pins: Pinterest offers Shoppable Pins that turn your product images into direct buying opportunities.
  

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• Leverage product tags: You can tag products in your Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube posts and videos, allowing people to click on them to visit your store and make purchases.
  

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• Host Live shopping events: Live shopping events bring the in-store experience to social media. By hosting a Live session, you can showcase products, answer questions, and drive immediate purchases.
  

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Apart from these, you can always add purchase links to your stories, reels, and other social media content, if the platform allows it.

11. Monitor Performance and Improve Your Strategy

Last but not least, monitoring your ecommerce marketing results on each social media channel is crucial to maximizing campaign ROI.

Use insights and analytics features of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube along with third-party social media analytics tools, to gain insights into what’s working and what isn’t. Discover:

• Which types of content work best for engagement and sales?
• Who follows you on various social channels?
• Who interacts the most with your content?
• When does your content get the most engagement?
• Which influencer’s posts drive maximum clicks and sales?

Leverage SocialPilot’s social media analytics dashboard to get ready-to-use reports and great data visualization options.

Try SocialPilot for free!

3 Social Media Ecommerce Examples

Here are real-life examples of ecommerce brands that use social media marketing successfully.

1. Sephora: Shoppable Posts and Stories

Sephora has created an Instagram Shop and often shares posts that direct its followers to the shop and buy the products promoted in those posts.

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Besides these Shoppable posts, Sephora also creates fun and engaging videos to build an online community of beauty lovers. It also shares daily stories to keep its audience engaged and shares calls-to-action links for various purposes. This includes anything from RSVPing for an event to checking out the latest product launch.

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2. ANUA: Influencer Reviews

ANUA is a Korean skincare brand that frequently collaborates with beauty influencers on YouTube to promote its products. Instead of a paid promotion, however, it sends product samples to top influencers, who review its products on their channels.

Here’s one example where the influencer created a detailed review video for the brand’s products and also shared purchase links:

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This is a low-cost social media marketing strategy that delivers great results because people trust honest influencer reviews more than paid ads.

3. Apple: UGC Campaign

Apple’s #shotoniphone UGC campaign generated over 31 million posts on Instagram alone. The brand encouraged users to post photos taken with iPhones, showcasing their camera quality and generating free publicity for the brand.

Apple also re-shares selective user-posted photos on its official profile and credits the user.

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Conclusion

Okay, so you have seen just how powerful social media can be for your ecommerce store. It is way more than just posting pretty pictures.

From driving direct sales with Shoppable posts to building a loyal community that loves your brand, the opportunities are massive, especially with social commerce booming. But tapping into that potential doesn’t happen by accident. You need to have a plan to engage your ideal customers, generate traffic and sales, and meet your ecommerce goals.