Often called the “sharing economy,” a blast is a great way to build up your income in addition to your regular job. An often-shared fact about side hustles is that the wealthy often have multiple income streams—an average of seven, in fact. No matter what you are doing, using social commerce can make your side hustle go from a measly timesuck to a great income stream that will really start pulling its weight.
Get Yourself Out There
One of the biggest aspects of social commerce is social media. Without social media, your side-hustle, no matter what it is, won’t thrive. So get yourself out there! Do not just focus on Facebook to gain customers. If your side-hustle is something you do physically, like mow lawns, make jewelry, or craft, start an Instagram account and update it with new merchandise, works in progress, and finished products. If you are an Uber driver, share all the interesting locations you end up visiting.
While you are getting yourself out there, develop a working marketing strategy that you will actually be able to follow. The idea of a side hustle is that it isn’t a full-time job, just something you do passively or with minimal effort. Do not oversaturate yourself, and key in on specific days when your customer base is most likely to be online and actively looking at your profiles.
Get Shared
While your main social commerce goal is to get followers that translate into customers, don’t overlook the importance of other people’s followers too. A great way to get your business noticed is to get noticed and shared by other businesses! This is an especially great tip if you are in a community of side-hustlers that have a market that conveniently overlaps with yours. Share each other’s merchandise or services and boost each other’s signal. An example of this working off the net is the habit of small-town business owners to direct customers to other businesses that do not have quite the same products and services available, but share each other’s customer base nonetheless. The internet can be a shockingly small place, and word-of-mouth is the most powerful tool your business must succeed!
Get All Over the Place
The best way to get out there is to be active on multiple platforms, that way you are accessible to a wide audience. There’s no better way to gain real fans than by being followed on multiple social media platforms, and do not ignore their capacity to earn you cash. Youtube channels and blogs are both great ways to monetize your social media presence and get yourself exposed at the same time. While it may seem like a pain in the butt, if you end up getting good at it and getting into a regular rhythm, you won’t have any trouble at all turning advertising your side hustle into another side hustle of its own.
In fact, the real secret of a successful social media side hustle is getting your profiles to work for you. Whether you sell ad space on your blog or monetize your weekly vlog, it’s important to make all of your income streams and avenues work for you so you can get back to working smarter, rather than harder. A little investment might be worth it for you—Facebook ads are targeted using Facebook’s carefully crafted algorithm to focus on your specific market.
Get Your Friends in On the Action
It wouldn’t be social commerce without friends! Ask your friends to help you. Ask them to be models for your wearable products or guinea pigs for your consumables. This is particularly effective if your friends have big followings on social media. They can tell their friends and spread your influence over a wide net of people, friends of friends of friends. Customers are out there, you may just need a little help finding them.
Start targeting followers based on your target market. If you sell denture accessories, you probably aren’t going to have a big following on Instagram or twitter, which is popular with younger users. You may have more luck on Facebook, where the user base is more likely to be older.
Encourage purchase sharing—making it easy for friends to share with each other what they bought on social media. Amazon has a great example of this. After checkout, the site gives users the option to share to many popular sites like Facebook and Twitter and spread their enthusiasm about what they purchased. This is a great way to get people interested and turned on to what kinds of products your company stocks.
Get in Tune with Your Customers
While it may seem like a no-brainer, whatever gets you views, likes, and hearts, is going to drive your sales. Get in tune with your followers and see what it is that they react to best. Work your content so that it’s likeable and generates interest.
Do not worry, you do not have to come up with something totally new and fresh for every single company! Just do your own version of what you see working for others, and try things until something sticks. Social media can be mysterious and it isn’t always clear what will work for you and what won’t, but once you figure it out, stick with it.
Figure out what social media your market is most likely to use. Take Pinterest for example. Millions of users are on Pinterest, using it like a veritable shopping list to plan their next purchases. You could be selling to them! You could be on their neatly organized pinboards! Do not overlook these crucial little details.
Final Word
While using social commerce and getting into social media marketing can seem like a real ordeal, once you streamline the process and get into a groove, it’s the easiest thing in the world! Making your side hustles work for you and having a great time interacting with interesting people is the real gift of the online social sphere, and all it takes is a phone, some friends, and a little time. Now that you have unlocked the secrets of social commerce, get out there and see what it can do for your income!