Here at Hootsuite, we’re experts on social media trends and conversations. And right now, one of the most prevalent conversations in every corner of the internet (and at almost every dinner table) is the upcoming 2024 US presidential election.
Today, we’re pulling back the curtain. With the help of Hootsuite Listening powered by Talkwalker, we’re taking a close look at how the two candidates, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, are performing on social media — and what businesses can learn from their campaigns.
Key terms
In social listening, sentiment is the measurement of how many explicitly positive or negative keywords appear along a specific search term. The search terms we used for this analysis were Kamala Harris, Vice President Harris, Kamala, Donald Trump, President Trump, and Trump.
Net sentiment is the difference between positive and negative sentiment. For example, if 50% of posts on a topic are positive and 75% are negative, the net sentiment is -25%. A negative net sentiment score indicates that negative sentiment outweighs positive sentiment.
Results refers to the number of individual social media posts that mention a specific keyword. It is not a measure of how many times a keyword was used (e.g., a post that mentions “Harris” 5 times is still equal to 1 result).
How key campaign moments shaped public sentiment
Sentiment has shifted throughout the presidential race (although, in the social media sphere, neither candidate managed to break into net positive sentiment). Posts have gone viral, meme-able moments have occurred (again and again), and the word “unprecedented” has become a key part of the current cultural discourse.
Below is a look at each candidate’s net sentiment throughout 2024. The changes in sentiment reflect each campaign’s pivotal moments:
July 13: Attempted assassination of Donald Trump
July 15-18: 2024 Republican National Convention
July 21: Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race
August 2: The announcement of Kamala Harris as the new Democratic nominee
August 6: The announcement of Tim Walz as Harris’ running mate
August 12: Trump joins Elon Musk for a virtual chat hosted on X (formerly Twitter)
August 19-22: 2024 Democratic National Convention
September 10: The first presidential debate between Harris and Trump hosted by ABC News
October 1: The vice presidential debate between Walz and Vance hosted by CBS News
October 5: Elon Musk joins Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, PA (the location of the attempted assassination of July 13, 2024)
October 20: Harris’ 60th birthday
October 25: Trump interviewed on Joe Rogan’s podcast
October 27: Trump’s closing speech at Madison Square Garden
October 29: Harris’ closing speech at The Ellipse in Washington DC
According to our analysis, keywords related to Donald Trump generated nearly 50% more results than those related to Kamala Harris. To visualize, that’s almost 3 posts mentioning Trump for every 2 posts mentioning Harris.
But not all results are positive. An analysis of sentiment over the past 3 months shows that the majority of social media posts referencing either candidate are negative:
When using social listening, politicians and brands alike should be aware that an individual metric (e.g., the number of results) without context (e.g., sentiment) can’t be used to accurately measure success.
Each campaign is resonating more with different demographics
Hootsuite’s social listening tool can track data at a very granular level. You can include a breakdown by age, gender, or even location (down to the state level) in your analysis.
For example, are Gen Z voters more excited about a certain candidate in Georgia vs. Nevada? Are female-identifying voters posting more about a certain campaign in Arizona vs. Michigan? What is each candidate’s sentiment in key swing states?
Below, you can see Hootsuite’s social listening analysis of sentiment and mentions separated by age group over the past 3 months:
Harris has more positive sentiment in the 65+ age group, whereas Trump has more positive sentiment amongst all other age groups.
When slicing sentiment data by gender, the candidates’ scores don’t differ wildly over the past 3 months:
While Trump has more positive sentiment amongst male-identifying social media users, the two candidates are almost even in terms of net sentiment (which is negative) amongst female social media users.
American pop culture and the 2024 election
Whether presidential candidates like it or not, having the world’s eyes on you 24/7 gives the internet plenty of meme fodder.
Here, we’re taking a look at how pop culture has been interacting with the currently ongoing presidential campaigns — and vice versa.
Taylor Swift vs. Elon Musk
Both campaigns have enjoyed numerous endorsements from big names in politics, arts, sports, business, and more.
Dick and Liz Cheney, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Obamas, and numerous members of the Senate, have all publicly shown support for their chosen candidate.
The support expressed by pop culture figures has also created an influx of conversation on social media. When Taylor Swift and Elon Musk endorsed Harris and Trump, respectively, the internet went wild.
We thought it would be fun to see which celebrity’s endorsement generated a bigger immediate bump in online mentions:
The above chart shows results that mention keywords related to both Trump and Musk, and Harris and Swift within the same post. We filtered for the day of each endorsement (July 13th for Musk, September 10th for Swift), to get a snapshot in time.
Our data shows that Elon Musk had a bigger pull than Taylor Swift on social media. Musk and Trump generated 229.9k results on July 13th, whereas Swift and Harris generated 176.5k results.
Both endorsements followed big campaign moments (the assassination attempt on Trump and the presidential debate), fueling social media momentum.
Kamala is BRAT
The Harris campaign jumped on a viral trend the moment it launched by embracing the pop-culture impact of Charli XCX’s 2024 album BRAT. @KamalaHQ, the Harris Campaign’s official account on X, quickly created a banner that mimicked BRAT’s styling:
Charli XCX then chimed in herself, stating that “Kamala IS brat.” From there, Kamala x BRAT remixes went viral across almost every corner of social media.
While there are over 60k results on social media for posts mentioning both Kamala Harris and Brat, Charli XCX was (once again) eclipsed by Taylor Swift, who more than doubled Charli’s numbers with her endorsement of Harris.
Viral moments: Dogs and coconuts
One of the most viral moments of this year’s presidential race, according to social listening data, was Trump’s statement during the September 10th Presidential Debate:
“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
The Trump quote quickly went viral on social media, inspiring remixes, TikTok audios, and memes.
Similarly, the Harris Campaign was seemingly kicked off by a clip from a speech the Vice President gave in 2023 at the White House, in which she states “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and which came before you.”
Listening data shows, interestingly, that the clip’s viral surge began before Harris became the official nominee. It started gaining traction on social media following the presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and only grew more popular as her campaign for President officially kicked off.
So, whose quote went the most viral over the past 3 months? The data doesn’t lie:
“They’re eating the dogs” generated almost 10 times more results than Harris’ coconut tree soundbite, even though Harris’ quote is much older. Totals come to 839.7k results for Trump’s soundbite and “only” 87.8k results for Harris’.
What does this mean for you, and what can your brand learn from Harris vs. Trump?
As you can see, social listening uncovers a wealth of data about online audiences. With the right tools, you can learn what they’re saying, how they’re feeling, and where they’re most active. This, of course, goes well beyond the analysis of political campaigns.
Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise-level organization, you can use data points similar to the ones presented in this blog to shape your social media strategy. Customer sentiment is already affecting the ROI of your social campaigns — but you have to be aware of it to make the right strategic decisions.
Imagine how you could target your social ads if you knew that customers in North Carolina talked more about your product than in New York? Or how you could uncover your key demographics, such as the age of your ideal customer, and build content that spoke to their specific needs, preferences, and pain points?
So, what are you waiting for? With Hootsuite, you have brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment info at your fingertips. Start enhancing your social strategy with the insights that matter today.
The purpose of this blog is to share social listening data. It’s a representation of how people talk about presidential candidates online — not a prediction of who will win on Election Day.
Not all social media users talking about the election are American citizens who are eligible to vote in the U.S. election.
Audience demographics — down to political preference — vary from platform to platform.
While major social networks have guardrails against misinformation, bots and fake news are part of most modern political campaigns.
Some social platforms limit the distribution of political content, which naturally affects impressions and engagement.
If you don’t have a social listening strategy, you’re missing out on some of the most valuable data available to help build your business.
Social media listening tools allow you to build a solid understanding of what customers and potential customers think about you by analyzing what they say on social channels. You can also learn what they think about the competition. This is incredible market research readily available in real-time, as long as you know how to access it.
Key Takeaways
Social listening is the process of actively tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand, competitors, and relevant keywords on social media. It offers real-time insights into customer opinions and market trends.
It helps marketers understand audience preferences, identify market gaps, manage crises, improve customer relationships, find collaboration opportunities, and keep track of competitors. With the right integrations, social listening tools can streamline this process even further.
Social listening and social monitoring are not the same thing. Social monitoring is reactive, focusing on specific brand mentions for quick responses. Social listening is proactive, offering a broad view of online conversations for strategic decisions.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the practice of proactively monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitor brands, and related keywords.
Social listening lets you track every mention of your brand on social media in real time. You’ll be able to learn how customers feel about your products and services, what they want, and what they don’t want.
But don’t stop at tracking mentions of your brand. With social media listening, you can also:
Social listening insights can influence your business decisions, including marketing and product strategy, customer experience, and support. You can use the info you gain to make smarter, data-driven calls that can positively impact your business’s bottom line.
And to turn these insights into action, measuring your social media success is the next crucial step (keep scrolling!).
What is social media measurement?
Social media measurement is all about figuring out how well your social media marketing is performing. It involves tracking important metrics like engagement rates, reach, conversions, impressions, and so much more.
When you combine social media measurement with your listening strategy, you get a complete picture of how your audience actually interacts with your content.
This helps you see what’s working, what isn’t, and how to tweak your content for even better results!
The difference between social monitoring and social listening
They sound similar (and they are!), but the difference between social monitoring and social listening is simple. Social media listening is proactive — social monitoring is reactive.
Social monitoring looks at specific brand mentions and sends alerts whenever your brand is mentioned online. It is sometimes referred to as brand monitoring.
Social monitoring is useful for quickly responding to complaints, but it doesn’t give you a big-picture view of what people are saying about your brand or industry.
Social listening, on the other hand, gives you a complete overview of all online conversations related to your brand, products, industry, and competitors. This holistic approach provides valuable insights that can help you make strategic decisions about your marketing and social media strategy.
In short, if you want to stay on top of the latest social media trends and see what people are saying about your brand over time, you need a listening strategy.
The benefits of social listening for your business
If you’re not using social media listening, you’re creating your business strategy with blinders on. Current and prospective customers are already talking about your brand and industry online. It’s in your best interest to listen to what they have to say.
Here are some of the ways social listening can benefit your business.
Understanding your audience
Social media listening helps you better understand what your target audience wants from your brand. People will tell you what they want; you just have to listen.
For example, an existing customer might tweet about how much they love your product. Or, you might spot a conversation where people are looking for solutions your product could provide.
In both use cases, you can treat this as customer feedback, and use it to improve your offering and make your customers happier.
Business and product intelligence
Monitoring conversations around the industry also uncovers a ton of insight about what’s working and what’s not. People love to vent, so you can learn about customers’ needs and pain points related to products—both yours and your competitors. This kind of benchmarking is a key part of understanding brand health and shaping brand perception.
This information is a gold mine for your product development, marketing, and even customer service teams.
Once you modify your products, shipments, or customer service, tell people about it in a targeted campaign that highlights your commitment to listening and evolving based on their feedback!
Crisis management
Social listening allows you to track sentiment as it changes. You’ll know immediately when the tone of people’s conversations about your brand shifts.
This is like an early warning system for potential crises. Social listening can create opportunities to fix or address issues before they boil over.
If you see some negative sentiment, review the social feedback to identify the change’s source. While you’re at it, look for lessons that could prevent a similar misstep in the future. This can help you address PR disasters before they get out of hand.
The Loblaws boycott, for example, picked up speed by trending on X/Twitter. While Loblaws chose not to address the boycott, they were certainly aware of it and likely monitoring the situation.
Social listening can help you uncover questions and conversations about your industry on social media platforms. Still, you should refrain from using it as an opening to jump in and try to sell right off the bat.
If you’re going to join a conversation, do it with your audience in mind. What value can you add?
Online, you have the opportunity to develop relationships with potential customers in your industry. Once you have a relationship, you can nurture it for social selling.
Monitoring social conversations about your industry will give you a sense of who the important creators and thought leaders are in your space. These are important people to connect with. They can have a huge influence on how people feel about you.
Remember: This is a two-way street. Supporting others in your industry makes it more likely they will help you in return. Rather than trying to barge into an existing community, connect through collaborations with people within the community.
Keep an eye out for folks already saying great things about your brand. These are natural brand advocates, who support your brand reputation without any incentives! Reach out to them and look for opportunities to collaborate in meaningful ways.
Social listening is more than understanding what people say about you. It is also important to know what your competition is doing and how people talk about them and your industry.
The conversations you find might reveal a gap in the marketplace you could step up to fill. Or maybe it’s an opportunity to jump in and stir up some friendly competition — for clout, of course.
Wendy’s, for example, is always quick to jump on their competitor’s Tweets.
Track relevant keywords and hashtags related to your industry to stay ahead of the curve.
You can also use social listening to predict future trends by analyzing what people are talking about now and how those conversations have changed over time.
These insights can shape your content strategy, product development, and marketing campaigns.
Personalization is key to any social advertising campaign. Your audience wants to feel like you’re speaking to them directly and not just churning out generic messaging.
Social listening will show you the issues your audience cares about, the kind of language they use, and what resonates with them. Think of it like a survey that’s always running in the background.
Use these insights to inform your campaign, from the copy to the visuals. This will help you with smart content creation and speaking directly to your audience.
How to create your own social listening strategy in 5 steps
Jumping straight into social listening without a plan is a good way to get overwhelmed. Make the most of your time and energy by starting with a social media listening strategy.
Here’s how to create one in five simple steps.
Step 1: Decide on your goals
There’s so much data out there. If you don’t first decide on your objectives, you’ll be drowning in information. Determining your goals allows you to filter the noise.
To determine your goals, ask yourself:
Is it important to know how my brand stacks up against the competition?
Do I know where we stand in the marketplace?
Are people enjoying our products? Could they be improved?
Do we know what our customer sentiment is?
Do people know we exist?
Do people know our products or services can solve for [this specific issue]?
The answers to these questions will tell you whether you should focus on brand awareness, outranking your competitors, or improving your product offerings.
Step 2: Decide on the search terms and competitors you should keep an eye on
Once you know what you’re working towards, you’ll have a better idea of the keywords you need to target.
Start making lists of keywords and search terms you’ll need to target. These might cover:
The keywords associated with your brand or industry
Your competitor’s names
The keywords associated with your products or services
Step 3: Choose a social listening tool
Choosing a listening platform is one of the most important things you must do when setting up a social media listening strategy. We love Hootsuite and Talkwalker for obvious reasons.
And luckily, every Hootsuite plan includes everything you need to get started with social listening.
Use Listening Basics to discover trending hashtags, brands and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand.
You can track what people are saying about you, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days.
Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:
Key metrics. Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their social media posts? Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying — it uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.
Top themes. How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
Results. Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.
Watch social media expert Trish Riswick explain how to get started with Hootsuite’s social listening in the video below:
And if you want to take social listening to the next level, our upgraded listening can show you sentiment over time, top influencers in your space, audience demographics, and much more. Interested in a free demo? Book one now.
Create a system for responding to common social listening findings. Note which comments can be acted on immediately and how and which should be sent up the chain of command.
Some actions can be taken immediately, such as liking or reposting a positive comment or sending a quick response to a complaint.
Some things should be saved for future consideration, like conversational trends, potential brand ambassadors, or recommended new products or services.
Then, create a spreadsheet to compile your findings. This will help you easily recognize trends and patterns and turn your findings into actionable insights.
Step 5: Use the insights you’ve gleaned to inform your digital strategy
You can better inform your larger digital strategy by:
Continuously tracking mentions,
Compiling data from your campaigns and social accounts, and
Keeping an eye on your brand sentiment and share of voice.
For example, you might notice people consistently posting about one feature of your product suite. It would make sense to focus your marketing efforts on amplifying this feature.
Whatever you find, be sure to share your social listening report with your team. Social listening analytics can benefit everyone.
2 top social media listening tools
Social listening tools pull data from multiple sources, helping you find valuable information about how people are talking about your brand, products/services, and industry.
Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or part of an enterprise, here are two social media listening tools you can start using today.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s number one in our hearts, thanks to the user-friendly Quick Search tool included in every plan, easy social media analytics tools, competitor analysis, and more. It’s really the most versatile social media management and listening tool out there.
Listening Basics allows you to use Hootsuite to automate monitoring conversations, keywords, mentions, and hashtags.
Listening also allows you to stay informed about your industry. You can easily monitor the competition and build relationships with social media creators and potential brand advocates.
It’s an easy tool to set up and monitor, taking the guesswork out of your marketing.
Talkwalker offers more than 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, podcasts, and social networks.
You’ll be able to monitor conversations around your brand and measure engagement, potential reach, comments, and sentiment.
Talkwalker also offers AI-powered tools that turn hard social listening data into actionable insights. Essentially, it does the heavy lifting for you.
5 pro tips for social listening
1. Listen for the right words and topics
Successful social listening is all about choosing the most relevant keywords for your brand.
The keywords and topics you monitor will likely evolve over time. Social listening and social media monitoring tools can teach you what kinds of words people use when discussing your business and your industry. You’ll also start to understand the insights that are most useful to you, ranging from competitive analysis to sentiment about your pricing, and everything in between.
If you need help getting started, here’s a list of important keywords and topics to monitor:
Your brand name and handles
Your product name(s)
Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles
Industry buzzwords
Your slogan and those of your competitors
Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies (your CEO, spokesperson, etc.)
Campaign names or keywords
Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors
Unbranded hashtags related to your industry
You can also monitor common misspellings and abbreviations.
2. Listen in the right places
Part of discovering what your audience has to say about you is learning where they have their conversations.
You need to know where people are talking about you and your industry and how those conversations vary across networks.
For example, do they praise you on Instagram but voice complaints on X/Twitter?
This behavior will help you optimize your marketing strategy for joining relevant conversations through both organic engagement and paid advertising.
3. Narrow your search
Once you’ve determined which terms and networks you should monitor, you can use more advanced search techniques to filter your results.
For example, depending on your market, you might want to limit your social listening efforts by geography. You won’t be concerned about the social media conversation in Greece if you run a local business in Iowa.
4. Share what you learn
Social listening provides a wide range of useful information for your whole company.
The customer service, content marketing, and product development teams could all benefit from what you learn while listening on social media. Make sure to communicate your insights and seek input from those teams, too. They might have specific questions you could answer by tweaking your social listening setup.
5. False positives are okay (within reason)
When you set up a query to monitor for a specific keyword or phrase, some posts that might not be relevant will sneak into the results. We call these false positives.
It’s okay to see a few of these within reason. Hootsuite’s social media marketing team tries to get false positives below the 5% threshold.
Work to refine your search queries so that the majority of your results match what you’re looking for.
Social listening strategy examples from brands you love
We’ve pulled together a few social listening examples to show you the concept IRL.
1. Spotify
Spotify has an entire Twitter account and website dedicated to customer conversations. This type of social listening allows people to come directly to them.
The Spotify Cares account also monitors tagged and untagged mentions, so they never miss an opportunity to offer support.
2. McDonald’s Canada
In 2023, McDonald’s limited edition Grimace shake took over the internet, but Canadian consumers missed out on all the fun — and weren’t quiet about voicing their displeasure.
Social listening isn’t just about noticing what your customers want, either. Sometimes, it means paying attention to what your competition’s customers don’t want.
After Apple’s “Crush” iPad ad went viral for all the wrong reasons…
Not only did Alix Earle get a beautiful new vacation rental, but Airbnb managed to generate some serious goodwill among the creator’s 6M+ TikTok followers.
All thanks to the power of social listening!
Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor keywords and conversations on social media, so you can focus on taking action on the insights available. Try it free today.
Retail ecommerce sales hit $5.621 trillion in 2023. And sales through social networks accounted for an estimated 18% of total online sales. By the end of 2024, ecommerce sales are expected to top $6 billion.
Ecommerce and social media marketing are like two peas in a pod. Social media marketing strategies drive traffic to ecommerce sites and can even drive direct sales. Meanwhile, ecommerce sites, sales, and promotions can draw attention to your social media accounts. This contributes to growing your loyal follower base.
Key takeaways
Social media is essential for product discovery, especially for younger shoppers — over half of Gen Z primarily use it to research brands.
The majority of consumers plan to buy from brands they follow on social media. Nurturing these connections with user-generated content, testimonials, and active engagement builds trust and increases sales over time.
Direct social commerce tools (like Instagram Shops or Shoppable Pins on Pinterest) let users shop without leaving social apps, minimizing friction in the buying process. Supporting these social storefronts with strategies like targeted ads and product tagging helps boost sales.
Note: We’ll touch on social commerce in this post – that is, making sales directly on social media platforms through their native shopping tools. But if that’s your primary focus, check out our in-depth guide to social commerce first.
The benefits of using social media for ecommerce
Build awareness of your brand and products
Social platforms are overtaking search engines as the primary method of product discovery and brand research. Especially among younger shoppers. For example, 51% of Gen Z mainly uses social media to look up brands and new products, compared to the 45% who use search engines..
Here’s the thing: You can’t view your social channels primarily as a promotional channel. The top social media turn-off among consumers is when brands are too focused on self-promotion.
Building brand awareness is a process. It takes time, and it requires you to put your followers first. To help, follow these tips:
Showcase your personality and values. More than half (56%) of consumers think brands should be more relatable on social media.
Demonstrate your value. This goes beyond the value of your products. Think about what value you can offer your followers directly on social media. Hint: Consumers most appreciate content that teaches them something new or makes them laugh.
Nurture an engaged audience of potential customers
Seventy percent of people who follow brands on social media plan to buy from them (soon or in the future). Getting more of your target audience to follow your social accounts directly equates to making more social media ecommerce sales.
Perhaps even more important, 58% of people say that following a brand on social has a moderate to high impact on their purchase decisions. For marketers, this means that attracting a follower is not enough. You need to nurture the relationship over time to keep your target demographic following and keep your brand top of mind.
For active shoppers, the most appealing things a brand can do on social media are:
have an interesting point of view, and
maintain an active social media presence that includes interacting with followers.
Keep in mind that brand content shared by a personal contact is the most effective for nudging people from brand awareness to consideration. Building a community that values and reshares your content is a powerful way to use social media marketing for ecommerce businesses.
Tap into relevant conversations
Social media can be a data goldmine for your brand. Social listening is the process of scanning social media for mentions of your brand or relevant conversations.
Specialized tools like Hootsuite Social Listening provide detailed insights into the conversations and topics that have the most potential ecommerce impact for your brand.
You’ll get a real-time look at what customers want from your brand, as well as any pain points that may be limiting social media ecommerce sales.
Social listening helps you identify potential buyers on the verge of making a purchase decision. Then, your team can reach out and seal the deal. You’ll also be able to identify the most valuable influencers for potential partnerships that drive sales.
Make more sales
The vast majority of consumers have made at least one purchase based on social media posts from ecommerce brands in the last 12 months. That includes 81% of Gen X and baby boomers, and 87% of Gen Z and millennials.
If you’re not winning those ecommerce customers over with your social content, you can be sure your competitors are.
Social media ecommerce offers several ways to make more sales, including:
4 not-super-obvious tips for a successful social media ecommerce strategy
1. Focus on success stories and testimonials
It’s reasonable for new customers to be skeptical about buying from brands they discover on social media. Consider that 44% of the 56,000 social media frauds reported to the FTC in the first six months of 2023 related to ecommerce. Those bad actors make it harder for good brands to win over new buyers.
That’s where success stories and testimonials from real customers come in. They help foster the brand trust you need to overcome skepticism and nudge social media users toward a sale.
Plus, everyday people are seen as much more trustworthy than brand employees, CEOs, and celebrities.
Using the social commerce features available through social platforms is one way to create a seamless online shopping experience. But it’s not the only way. Here are some important strategies to reduce friction in the social media ecommerce marketing process:
Create a landing page for the specific product or offer highlighted in social ads. Don’t make users search your online store for the thing that caught their eye.
Use a link in bio tool like HootBio to link each social post to the relevant content on platforms that don’t allow direct linking.
Use retargeting options in social ads to nudge people to complete purchases in abandoned shopping carts.
3. Encourage (and reshare) UGC
Encourage customers to share pictures and video content featuring your products on social media. You could create a branded hashtag for easy tracking, or ask them to tag your brand. Social media contests and giveaways can be an effective way to bring in UGC.
Social listening can also help you identify potential UGC where the original poster does not tag your brand.
In the context of ecommerce, UGC could include:
reviews
product unboxing
content in which a customer uses, discusses, or shows off your products or services
customers sharing their experiences with your brand or team
This ties back to the importance of positive reviews and social proof.
User-generated content is also an effective way of showcasing brand values. And it does so without veering into the overly promotional territory that turns social followers off. Don’t underestimate the importance of value alignment: 84% of people say shared values are a critical factor in the buying decision.
4. Provide customer service on social media channels
No social media ecommerce strategy is complete without taking customer support into account. Social platforms are ideal for nurturing and supporting existing customers. Because of that, they’ve become a de facto customer support channel for most major brands.
Tools like a unified social inbox and AI chatbots can help ensure your customers get the customer service they need in a timely manner. Hootsuite Inbox auto-routes incoming queries to the most relevant team member to smooth the process.
Some customers and followers will post their questions and concerns publically, or tag you with questions or complaints. Remember that how you handle complaints publicly speaks volumes about how you handle them privately. Always respond to public comments promptly and with grace.
How to make more sales by combining social media and ecommerce
Brands wanting to use social media for ecommerce sales can sell directly on social platforms using native solutions like Facebook Shops, Instagram Shops, Pinterest Product Pins, or TikTok Shop.
In this case, brands can sell without even creating their own ecommerce store, as customers can shop, select, and complete checkout without leaving the social media apps.
As you’ve seen, this is certainly not the only way to use social media for ecommerce, but it is a major potential source of ecommerce revenue. For example, eMarketer predicts that 36.9% of social buyers in the U.S. will purchase something on TikTok in 2024.
So what’s the best social media for ecommerce sales? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Tools like Hootsuite Analytics can give you a deep understanding of your customer base. Use this information to choose your primary social media ecommerce platforms, then do some testing to further refine your platform mix over time.
Keep in mind that the platform driving the highest number of ecommerce sales is not necessarily the one driving the highest revenue. For example, on Black Friday last year, TikTok’s average order volume was $43, compared to $95 for Meta.
Set up shop
Consider setting up a storefront on one of the social commerce platforms provided by the major social media networks:
Meta Shops: These online storefronts allow you to sell directly on Facebook and Instagram. Customers can access your shop from your Facebook Page, Instagram profile, Instagram ads, or shoppable content in your feed, stories, and Reels. Learn more about Facebook shops and Instagram shops.
TikTok Shops: You can display and sell products directly through in-feed TikToks, TikTok Lives, your own Shop page, or the Shop tab. Learn more about TikTok Shops.
Post shoppable content
In addition to an actual storefront, you can create shoppable content to combine social media and ecommerce.
Product tags on Instagram and Facebook
Upload products to your Facebook and/or Instagram catalog, then add product tags to any post, story, or Reel.
Users who click on the product tag are directed to the specific product that caught their eye. You can choose whether to set the process up to complete the purchase within the app, or on your own ecommerce site.
You can tag your own products, of course, but you can give creators access to tag your products too. This is a great way to use social media marketing for ecommerce influencer campaigns.
You can also include product tags in Facebook and Instagram ads for effective and direct ecommerce social media advertising.
Shoppable Pins
Upload your product catalog and Pinterest will automatically make a product Pin for every listing.
You can sort your Pins into product groups to keep things organized. If you want to add budget to your Pinterest ecommerce efforts, you can run Pinterest shopping ads.
To highlight your shoppable Pins on your own profile, save them to a public board.
You can also add meta tags to your website that allow other Pinterest users to create shoppable Pins featuring your products, extending your reach with baked-in social proof.
3 examples of social media ecommerce done right
Inspiration time! Let’s look at some brands using social media effectively to drive ecommerce sales.
1. Houseplant
Seth Rogan’s company selling ashtrays and other “thoughtfully-designed objects for people who like nice things” creates beautiful content showcasing their products with a unified aesthetic.
Much of the content has a midcentury modern vibe. This shoppable post mimics a magazine ad from the Mad Men era.
Clicking the product links in the post takes users to a product listing with a significant discount on the product, with more product details and a link to buy on the Houseplant website. Users can also tap or scroll to see more from the Houseplant Instagram shop.
In this Reel, rather than tagging products directly, the creator asks viewers to comment “Link” to get an automated DM with a link to her personal Aerie shop. She adds the helpful tip that she is wearing a size large in all items.
With too many products to tag in one Reel, the automated DM link option makes it easier for viewers to shop all the products featured.
Influencer marketing allows viewers to see the clothes in real-world situations, rather than just on a model in a studio, increasing trust.
3. Riversol
This skincare brand took a unique approach to showcasing customer reviews and testimonials. They simply asked people to comment on their customer experience with the brand in a Facebook post.
The original post is actually three years old, but the company continues to boost it as an ad, and new comments and testimonials keep coming in. The company makes sure to respond to each comment, and users even interact among themselves. This ongoing conversation provides a solid stock of social proof.
The brand’s 62,000 Facebook followers have become used to this level of engagement with the brand and fellow fans. They have active conversations in the comments in many of the brand’s posts.
All of this drives impressive brand loyalty that translates directly into ecommerce sales. The company sold out of its 2024 Holiday Favourites Set just three days after announcing the launch.
Why it works:
Social proof combined with a free sample helps overcome buying objections.
Building an engaged fan base helps followers feel like they are part of a community.
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