Overseas social media connects enterprises with users, which can improve brand awareness and user stickiness, and can also deliver traffic to websites and improve conversion. From the perspective of search engine optimization, regularly updated overseas social media accounts will also help improve the ranking of corporate websites and the exposure of corporate brands.
However, which platform or platforms to choose for operation, which one to use as the main and which one to use as the auxiliary, what content should be published on each account, and what is the purpose of each account operation are issues that we need to study clearly before investing manpower, material resources, and financial resources. It is probably not the right approach to open all accounts and adopt a unified strategy to repeatedly publish content to these accounts. If a user follows the company’s Facebook homepage, why should he go to Instagram to see the same content? However, if you want to operate multiple accounts and publish different content, it will significantly increase costs for the company and may even undermine brand consistency.
Cross-border e-commerce companies can choose social media marketing channels from the following aspects.
1. Determine channels based on demand (marketing goals)
First, starting from your own business needs, consider the marketing goals of your company. Generally speaking, the goals of social media marketing are:
· Increase brand awareness.
· Provide customers with a better user experience.
· Create channels for timely communication with customers.
· Drive traffic to the website.
· Collect market information.
After clarifying the goals of social media marketing, match them with the characteristics of each platform. The number of fans on each platform is certainly important, and users do tend to follow accounts with a certain degree of popularity, but it is definitely not the only indicator. Compared with the number of fans, user stickiness is more meaningful, such as how many likes, comments or reposts an article has, and whether the fans on the platform interact frequently.
2. Determine the channel based on the target customer (audience)
The second simple principle is to go to the social media marketing where the target customer group is. This question can be considered from the following dimensions:
· Who is the largest target customer group?
· Which country/region are they in?
· What age group are they in?
· Are there more men or women?
· Which platform do they use the most?
· What content do they like to watch most on these platforms?
· What unique value do their most popular overseas social media accounts provide them?
By answering the above questions, you can choose social media more clearly.
3. Determine channels based on content
What form of marketing is suitable for your product? Do you have the ability to support this form? Take video marketing as an example. Various research data predict that video content will explode in the next few years and become the largest destination for Internet traffic. However, there are also language difficulties in producing original videos in China. If we can get enough user-generated videos (User Generated Contents), then YouTube will be a good channel; but if we can only make a few simple foreign language videos, we will not be able to operate a YouTube account normally.
If visual marketing is important to your products, such as fashion products, then Instagram or Pinterest will be a better choice.
4. Decide the channel by the platform
The Matthew effect of social media is very obvious. There are often only one or two leading platforms in a niche field. Therefore, some cross-border e-commerce companies have a very clear purpose, which is to market on a specific social media platform. The top 15 social media platforms based on the two major indicators of registered users and active users announced by Digital Information World are shown in Figure 2-6.
5. Refer to the choices of excellent friends
Because there are many types of social media and they are developing and changing rapidly, it is difficult to fully grasp the relevant information. A tricky way is to refer to the choices of excellent friends. You can also use Google keywords + overseas social media platforms to search to quickly find the social media accounts of friends. For example, searching “Human hair wigs + facebook” or “Human hair wigs + Instagram” on Google can see the top-ranked accounts related to this keyword on different platforms.
This can not only see which platform operation is more suitable for your industry and products, but also refer to the unique features of these successful accounts.