How to Use Amazon Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Business

Optimizing your products for Amazon search rankings and generating organic sales is probably the bedrock of your strategy. But by utilizing social media, Amazon sellers can grow far bigger than just another third-party Amazon brand.

However, social media marketing for Amazon businesses requires a very different approach to growing on Amazon exclusively. It’s easier said than done, particularly with how diluted social media has become in recent years.

Keep reading to learn more about why your brand should be on social media, and how to use social media marketing most effectively to grow your Amazon store.

Why Social Media is So Powerful

So why take your brand to social media in the first place?

For a start, because there are just so many people on social media.

Check out this data on the number of active users on various social networks, around the world:

If you’re counting, that’s three platforms with over 2 billion active users, and three more with over 1 billion.

The majority of us today are always on social media. And as this chart shows, a large number of people visit these sites at least once per day.

This is big for brands, because you want to take your marketing to where the people are. You want to find where your target customers hang out, and put your brand in front of them.

There’s a good chance, whatever your audience, that they’re on social media.

Social media also happens to be a key part of many peoples’ online shopping process. 54% of shoppers use social media to research products, while 71% of people are more likely to make a purchase based on referrals from social media.

This is your chance to inject your brand and your products at a key stage in the buying process.

What Social Media Can Do For Your Amazon Business

Let’s dive deeper into what exactly social media can do for you, and how your Amazon business can grow by developing a social media marketing strategy.

A proactive way to get new customers

First, and most obviously, is the potential to generate sales.

You’re going to get more sales if you develop proactive strategies to go out and find customers, instead of waiting for them to find you. Social media is a great way to do this.

As it was established before, there are billions of people on a number of different social media platforms. If even a tiny percentage of these people are likely to want to buy your products, that’s still a huge audience of potential customers.

Lesser reliance on Amazon

When you have proactive ways to drive sales, such as with social media, you’re less reliant on the swings that come with the Amazon platform.

Algorithm changes, new competitors, the impact of new reviews, and many more factors can cause your sales to fluctuate. Worst case, you can wake up to zero sales. It’s a situation most Amazon sellers fear.

But if you have the ability to go and get customers on your own, you’re not going to be so worried about this. You’ll be able to sleep better at night, and your business will be more resilient.

Finding a unique voice for your brand

Nameless, faceless brands can have success for a little while – especially on a platform like Amazon, which comes with the built-in social proof of the Amazon brand.

Eventually, though, you’re going to need to build a brand with a unique voice and image. The faceless brands are too easy to replicate, at which point you have no point of difference.

Real brands develop a following, which gives them a leg up over new players in the market.

Social media is a great way to find your voice. You can be expressive with your brand and develop its image out in the open.

You’ll also find out how your audience talks, what they’re into, and what resonates with them, which will help you craft your image and voice in a way that’s more likely to connect with your target customer.

Building long-term brand assets

Getting on social media also allows you to build brand assets, which are unattainable if you’re only marketing on Amazon.

What are brand assets? A social media following is one. So is your brand itself, and its image and voice. These are assets that, once cultivated, you can use to help sell products.

An email list, or another kind of list of customers and contact details is another powerful brand asset you can build with social media.

You’re not given access to customers’ contact details from Amazon. That means you need to go outside Amazon, and get in touch with them before they find you on Amazon, to build such a list.

Don’t underestimate how powerful an asset like an email list is. It helps you sell more products via email marketing, build lookalike audiences on social media to reach more customers, and pick up and transfer your business to another platform if the worst happens and you can’t sell on Amazon anymore.

Different Ways to Utilize Social Media for Amazon Businesses

Now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty. How exactly can you use social media to grow your Amazon business?

There are a number of different ways you could go about it. Here are a few:

Profiles & fanpages

The easiest way to start using social media for your Amazon brand is by creating profiles and posting.

How fitness & nutrition brand Onnit uses their fanpage to post organically

For most platforms, this is absolutely free, so you don’t need a big investment to start – just a little time and effort.

Create a profile for your brand, post things, and share content relevant to your product and niche.

It might not provide any big wins, but there’s very little to lose here. And it’s a good way to start developing a voice for your brand.

Check out similar brands and what they do on social media. You probably won’t get a million followers overnight, but with time and consistency, this could be a plus for your business.

Paid ads

The other side of the coin is running paid social media ads.

Most social media platforms have become pay-to-play today, with organic reach declining and more preference given to brands who pay to be seen. So you’re likely to have much more tangible results by running ads.

It does, however, take a lot of money. And it takes quite a bit of time and effort to learn how to run ads effectively. A lot of brands have poured a lot of money into ads and gotten nothing back, because they didn’t know what they were doing.

At the end of the day though, paid ads are effective. They’re a great way to build your brand outside of Amazon, and increase your sales. But you need to be patient, know what you’re doing, and have enough money to invest in your ads.

If you want to get started with paid social media ads, these posts will help:

Influencer marketing

Another way to utilize social media for your brand is to partner with people who already have an audience.

This is known as influencer marketing, and it might be the most underrated way to drive sales for Amazon products.

Influencer marketing means you get other people to promote your product to their audience. These are “influencers”, people who can influence others to take up trends or buy products.

These partnerships generally involve a one-off fee or per-click/per-sale arrangement to compensate the influencer. They might give your product a shout out, or you might collaborate in a deeper way on some kind of content to share with their audience.

You can find influencers on just about any platform, most notably:

Instagram
TikTok
Blogs
YouTube
Podcasts

Basically, whenever someone has a large audience, there’s the potential to partner with them to boost your brand.

The key to doing this right is, first, to find someone in the same niche as yours, with an audience that consists mostly of your target customers.

Then you also need to find people with a large, and engaged audience. Be wary of influencers with large followers, who rarely get any likes, comments and shares on their posts.

There are many ways you can go about the partnership, from simply sharing a discount code for your product, to more in-depth content collaborations.

The more organic you can make these partnerships feel, the better the results, in terms of your brand image and how many sales you generate.

Related: how and why to use landing pages for influencer marketing campaigns.

Niche research

One more idea to utilize social media for your Amazon brand doesn’t involve promotion or marketing at all.

Social media is a great way to get to know your target audience. It’s a platform for people to express themselves. So if you want to know what someone likes, what they dislike, how they talk, what engages them, social media is a great place to find out.

At the very least, you’ll want to use social media to figure out more about your ideal customer avatar. Go to places they’re likely to hang out, such as communities, social media groups, etc.

You might find some very valuable information that helps you speak more directly to your customers in the future, as well as crafting your products in a way that resonates with the people you want to sell to.

One example of using social media for niche research – going on niche subreddits like Reddit’s r/supplements

Tips For Your Amazon Social Marketing Strategy

Here are some tips to get your Amazon social media marketing strategy right, and ensure it delivers the most value for your brand, and your business.

Choose the right platform(s)

Finding the right platform to promote your brand on is the first step.

There are many social media platforms out there. While generally more users is better, there’s no universal answer for the “best” social media platform to promote your brand.

It depends greatly on your audience, and where they hang out and consume content most often. That’s not going to be the same for every brand.

There’s a good chance your audience will be found on one of these platforms:

Facebook
Instagram
TikTok
YouTube
Pinterest

These five platforms all boast a huge and diverse user base, and offer a number of ways to promote and share content.

However, you might also find that something like Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, Linkedin, or something else works for your brand. LinkedIn is a platform full of employees and business executives hence a useful platform for B2B sellers to generate leads using LinkedHelper and other tools for their business or simply making connections with the decision-takers of various organizations.

Do some research, and maybe even test the waters to figure out which platforms seem like a good fit with your brand.

Just don’t try to promote your brand on every platform right away. Choose one or two to focus on to start with.

Craft your content for the platform

After you choose which platform to use, you need to figure out the right kind of content for that platform.

Different content works effectively on each social media site. You need to fit your content, and how your brand communicates, in line with that.

For example, on TikTok, create short-form videos that feel organic to the platform.

If you’re on YouTube, you’ll want to create longer videos. While Instagram and Pinterest are all about creating images.

No one likes a brand that looks like it’s clearly on social media to sell to you, and that’s what your brand will look like if your content doesn’t fit the platform.

Further Reading: Three Ways to Promote Amazon Products on TikTok

Engage your audience

Engagement is the name of the game on social media. Almost every platform rewards accounts that are able to generate a lot of engagement. Things like post likes, comments and shares.

Try to post content with this in mind, instead of thinking of everything through the lens of promoting your brand. Post content that’s geared towards engagement. Ask questions from your audience. Encourage people to participate with your channel.

If you are able to do this, you’ll find you get a lot more eyeballs on your content. In addition, you’ll probably end up building a more loyal following, with a deeper connection to your brand.

Post regularly

With most social media platforms, you need to be active if you want to have any success.

If you only pop up every now and then to make a post, you’re not going to get much reach. Even if you do, content on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok has a notoriously short shelf-life, meaning you won’t get much in the way of lasting results.

You need to be consistent in posting. That’s one of the reasons you don’t want to spread yourself thin by trying to master too many platforms at once.

This doesn’t mean you should spam, and post 20+ times per day. But you don’t want to go too long without posting.

Sprout Social has some insight into the ideal number of posts per day for different social media platforms:

1-4x per day for TikTok
1-2x per day for Instagram
4-5x per day for Facebook
1x per day for Pinterest

It may not be essential to hit these targets exactly, but you should be somewhat close.

Get visual

Some platforms are different, but in general, a lot of success on social media comes from visual content. Think images, or even better, video.

Social media is designed for people with short attention spans. It’s scroll, scroll, that’s interesting, scroll, scroll, keep scrolling.

You’ve got to be saying something really extraordinary to capture and hold someone’s attention. It’s a lot easier, though, with visual content, which requires less effort and attention from the user.

It’s the price of entry on some platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, where you need an image or a video to post in the first place.

But even on something like Facebook or Twitter, today you really need an engaging visual to, at the very least, make the user stop scrolling and care about anything you write.

Measure results

Finally, it’s vital that you assess and measure the results you get from social media.

Even if you’re not spending a ton of money on ads and just posting organically, the time and effort you spend on social media has to add up to something eventually.

You want to know that your social media marketing strategy is bringing people into your overall marketing funnel, and the conversation doesn’t just stop with the post on social media.

There are a number of ways you can track this. Linking to your product is one, obviously. But you don’t have to get sales for your social media marketing to be a success.

You might also share links to your website, or measure results by the level of engagement you get on your posts, as well as overall reach (which indicates increased awareness of your brand).

If you’re sharing links to your product, use Amazon Attribution to know how many sales and add to carts you’re getting as a direct result of your social media marketing.

You can create new links for each marketing campaign, or at the very least, for each social media platform, to be able to segment your data and find out what exactly works best.

Final Thoughts

Social media can be a powerful tool to build your Amazon brand, when done right.

Is it diluted? Yes. Does it take a lot of effort, time and/or money to get meaningful results? Yes.

But the benefits, if you can build and execute an effective social media marketing strategy, are well worth it.

This is especially true for Amazon brands, who are in a precarious position when they allow all their eggs to sit in the Amazon basket.

Start thinking about how you can leverage social media to grow your Amazon business. It takes time, so the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll build a more resilient and powerful brand.

How to Use Amazon Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Business

Resources

Grow your Amazon Business with LandingCube

Why Social Media is So Powerful