Create Successful Ecommerce Promotions with Social Sharing

Note: Publicize is now auto-share and is part of Jetpack Social.

Online sales are a great way to draw customers to your online store and encourage them to make purchases. However, holding a sale doesn’t really benefit your business if no one knows about it.

Website promotions should be shared with your audience, and one of the best ways to get the word out is through social media. Today, we’ll discuss how to promote sales with social media using Jetpack.

Sharing is caring with Jetpack

One of the most effective ways to promote your products or services is through first-hand referrals. Your customers chose you over competitors, and they will likely recommend your store to their friends and families if you give them an easy way to do so.

Social media sharing tools place icons on your site with the goal of allowing visitors to share your page on their social networks. You probably see sites that have this feature as a “share on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram” link. Unlike the “visit out social media page” icon that may lead a user to your Twitter feed, the sharing links allows visitors to promote your content on their own social networks.

You are pretty much getting free marketing from your customers. Even better, this is often viewed as a referral from a trusted source. When someone shares your link to their Facebook page, their friends view it as a trusted recommendation. This can lead to even more purchases than traditional marketing strategies do.

Explore Jetpack’s social and sharing tools, your theme, and any plugins you installed for a variety of social sharing options they bring to your site. Many themes will display your social media links within the headers or footers. Some will display social sharing links under each post, allowing your customers to share their discoveries to their own social accounts.

How do you set up social connectivity on your site? It varies depending on which theme and plugins you have in place. Let’s talk about the most common methods, including further actions you can take using Jetpack.

Make it easier to spread the word

Encouraging your customers to spread the word gives your brand immediate access to people you wouldn’t normally reach on your own. The trust that’s created when a customer shares a link to your website promotions with their own social circles can be invaluable.

Thankfully, there is an easy way to add “share this” icons to every page and post on your site…including your special sale items.

Jetpack comes with social sharing buttons out-of-the-box. Once you activate Jetpack, a new Sharing menu will appear in your settings. Scroll down to Sharing Buttons and click and drag the social media buttons you want to use from the Available Services area to the Enabled Services area.

You will see a collection of icons with the logos for each social service you add. Scroll down the page and check off pages and posts to display these icons at the bottom of every page and post on your site.

Your visitors now have a way to share your promotions. They just need to click a button to let their networks know that your products are on sale.

Go the extra mile with Publicize

Speaking of Jetpack’s social media options, your promotional post can get some extra mileage if you enable Publicize.

Turn on Publicize, and go back to Settings > Sharing. At the top of that page, you’ll see new options with links to the major social media services, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and others. Click the Connect button next to each service you want to share your posts to. This allows your site to “talk to” and share with your social media accounts.

A new Publicize entry will appear within each post’s Publish action box in your editor. When you publish a post, it will automatically send a link and article synopsis to your social media accounts. A post about your upcoming website promotion will automatically appear on your social media feeds, no extra work required on your end!

Here’s another useful tip: click the Edit Details link that appears next to Publicize. Create a custom message to tailor the text that appears within your social media posts, and add some hashtags to track any conversations surrounding them.

Publicize’s default setting is to match your post title. This probably won’t contain any hashtags. Editing the custom message allows you to add hashtags while leaving your site content untouched. Adding popular, relevant tags after the title is a great way to get more traction and make sure that everyone who’s interested in your business can see your post, even if they don’t follow you.

Use socially-aware themes

Many WordPress themes, including themes available from Jetpack, come pre-packaged with social media connectivity. One of the most common options is the Social Menu, a row of icons that link to your social media pages. This is not the same as the sharing links noted above, but is still an important part of reaching out to your audience.

A social menu is a pre-defined area of your theme where an icon array linking to your business’s various social media accounts appears. It gives your visitors the option to quickly follow your social media accounts. This makes it easier to alert followers about any upcoming ecommerce sales you have planned.

Setting up your social menu

The process of setting up a social menu varies by theme, but the most common method is to create a menu built from custom links.

If your theme has a social menu option, you will see it under Appearance > Menu > Manage Locations. To use this feature, go to Edit Menus on the same page and click Create New Menu. Check off Social Menu under Menu Location at the bottom. You’re now ready to add your social media links.

Then, paste in your business page URL.

Now, go back to your WordPress custom menu to add a custom link menu entry. Paste the URL that you copied from your social media site into the URL box, and type the name of the site (i.e. “Facebook”) into the Link Text box. Then click Add to Menu. Repeat for every social media account you want in your Social Menu and click Save Menu.

A Jetpack theme that supports the Social Menu feature will place links to your social media accounts on your site. It’ll also replace the text with those familiar social media icons.

Do you have any tips for using social media to promote ecommerce sales? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments section!

Lance Cleveland

Dad. Explorer. Rum Lover. Code Geek. Not necessarily in that order. Create of Store Locator Plus, the "enter your zip code, find the locations" map solution for WordPress.