A successful e-business has two essential ingredients. It must be easy to make payments, and it must come up quickly when consumers are searching online.
To streamline transactions, I recommend payment options that are non-intrusive and simple to confirm. Always go with external payment options that require as little information as possible (email or mobile number). Doing so will enhance user experience and create satisfied customers.
To make payments easy, it's also important that a company be accessible online. There are social media tactics that can help make a business easy to find online.
Choosing the right network can be helpful. Facebook is great for search engine optimization (SEO) when the posts are public, but when users engage and reshare your public content; it is usually only viewable by friends of that user. Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest are much better for mass distribution of a message you want the search engines to see. Remember, if you cant see it without logging into the network, then the search engines cant either.
It's also important to format your content for the network. Each social network is unique, so why would you use the exact same content on each one? I often see posts on Twitter that were obviously copied from another source and the message is broken. If I post something to Facebook that is over 140 characters, I cant expect it to show up on Twitter in the same complete fashion (it will be truncated.) So if you are going to tie your accounts together for convenience, make sure your posts are formatted to be uniform on as many networks as possible.
Search engines love conversation threads. When people ask questions on a specific topic and a thread of opinions and answers begin to form around it, search engines find keyword pay dirt. With multiple sources all weighing in on the same topic, the topic becomes much more relevant. Reddit is a great example of a social forum that can generate great SEO when a topic gets traction. Ask questions relevant to your brand or product, take a unique stance that will elicit more opinions, and always make sure your profile points people directly to your site. It can also be useful to join groups and gatherings. There are keyword rich conversations going on around the social sphere that the search engines have already found. Forums, public FB pages, Twitter trends, and FB group pages are a great place to start looking. By jumping in on conversations relevant to your brand and weighing in with your opinions, you can establish yourself as a valued resource. Not only is this a good way to reach new potential customers, but if links to the conversation already have solid placement on the search engines, then anyone who visits will be exposed to your brand as well.
Hashtags (#) have become the standard way to single out talking points in social media posts, so it's important to use keyword rich trend tags. Whether you are posting #pictures on Instagram, #tweets on Twitter, or #statuses on Facebook using popular keywords along with the right trending topics can help your content get noticed. Search engines like Google have been forced to pay attention to things trending on social networks ever since they became up to the minute sources for news. By tagging your posts with not only what is #trending and relevant to your content, but also adding tags in the form of #keywords you would typically use for search, can help take your posts beyond the social realm and into the organic search listings. This tactic works especially well when you have lots of people re-sharing it, so offering additional incentives like a coupon or promotion to get people to redistribute your content is always recommended.
Ben Stewart is a founder of Social Rebate, an e-commerce marketing platform.
