Storytelling in Social Media for Ecommerce Results

In my professional experience here at Endertech and as digital designer in general, one of the most common questions I’ve heard from e-commerce clients is how to approach social media marketing. If you’re an owner or employee of a small to medium sized e-commerce site, then this article is for you.

It’s a big issue. The e-commerce marketplace is full of competing sellers, everyone is vying for that precious spot on the first page of Google search results, and everyone is trying to leverage their social media presence to return the most results for the time/money invested. This series of articles is about getting the most out of your social media efforts.

I’ve heard the following things said many times from owners of small e-commerce sites: “How do I market my products without it feeling spammy? How many different ways can you post the same picture of a product and ask people to buy it? What else can I do to promote my business besides just posting about the products I sell?” These aren’t easy questions to answer.

Why Storytelling?

Lately here at Endertech, we’ve become fans of Kindra Hall. Hall advocates using storytelling in business to all sorts of different ends, and her insights most certainly apply to e-commerce.

So, as a stakeholder in an e-commerce business, why introduce storytelling into your social media campaigns? What’s so great about it? Well, as Hall puts it, social media has transformed the marketplace. As she says, “With the introduction and the shift towards social media, consumers feel they are entitled to know more about brands. They are not just buying things based on what the thing will do or how much it will cost, but they are buying the whole persona of a brand or a company. Accordingly, brands have also made this shift towards telling stories.”

In other words, in today’s social media marketplace, storytelling is proving to be the way that potential customers learn about your business. It’s not enough to just simply say who you are, what you sell, what your prices are, and how much shipping costs. People want to find out who they’re buying from. They want to know your story.

That’s all well and good, but going beyond that, how do you use storytelling to sell individual products, and meet social media’s insatiable demand for new and ever more content? As it turns out, storytelling works here too. In fact, it’s perfect for meeting social media’s never-ending hunger for fresh content.

In the next three articles, I’ll talk about storytelling in three different contexts:

Brand Stories – How do you talk about your business in your social media posts? How do you convey your business’s values, goals, and unique personality and character through your social media posts?

Origin Stories – For those of us who were into superheroes as a kid, we think of “origin stories” as the stories behind our favorite villains and heroes – what planet were they originally from? How did they get their super powers? What made them so good, or so bad? For us mere mortals, our origin stories probably aren’t so fantastic, but they are ours! So proudly tell the story of how your business came to be, with gusto.

Product Stories – Here’s where the rubber hits the road: generating all those product-related posts on a daily basis with which to keep your business’s products in front of customers and feed social media. Can storytelling be a useful tool for tackling the job? Let’s find out.