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Talking about business use cases for Snapchat is bound to raise a few eyebrows—either in skepticism or eager interest.

The public-facing social proof you get from having tens of thousands of Likes on a Facebook Page, or Followers on Twitter, can do a lot to contribute social proof and make your brand look more legit.

But Snapchat, by its nature, isn't very good at that.

Instead, Snapchat is a hybrid of social network and instant messenger that lets you engage a smaller community of your biggest fans with an incredibly authentic form of content marketing.

Pretty Presets was created to solve a pain point that many photographers experience: editing takes a long time. Pretty Presets solves that problem with pre-made alterations for Lightroom that cut photo editing time in half. 

Because the business is so visual, Pretty Presets quickly turned to Pinterest as a marketing tool. Over the years, Pinterest has become their number one traffic source, accounting for 10% of sales.

In this customer spotlight, we chat with founder Laura Thomas about how she uses Pinterest to drive traffic—and revenue—for Pretty Presets.

With the announcement of Twitter’s acquisition of Periscope, a lot of business owners and marketers have been scrambling to figure out the best way to use this new platform to grow their business.

If you’re unfamiliar with Periscope, it’s an app (presently only for iOS) that allows you to live stream video to strangers and your Twitter followers from your phone or tablet. Viewers can comment and “heart” live streams as they watch, to interact with the broadcaster.

Alternatively, Meerkat, another similar live streaming app for phones and tablets, has also taken the internet by storm.

Periscope and Meerkat are not new opportunities to sell your products like you have been doing on Facebook or Pinterest. These new mobile live streaming tools provide a different opportunity to build your ecommerce business and create relationships with your customers. I’ll explain why this is important in this blog post.

If you’re struggling to understand how to use social media for your ecommerce business in a way that grows your audience, keeps your audience engaged and drives sales and traffic back to your website, don’t fret.

Here are 10 inspiring examples of social media done right, across different popular platforms, by different ecommerce businesses. You can apply these examples immediately into your own social media plan of attack to help you achieve results such as growth and engagement. Be sure to check out the 5 free bonus examples of social media done right by ecommerce businesses to give you even more ideas to start using in your social media strategy.

Business owners often wonder about the "ROI of social media". Is my Facebook page actually driving sales? Is all this tweeting really doing anything for my bottom line? Should I be on Pinterest and Instagram?

Well it turns out, when it comes to ecommerce, being social matters.

To better understand how social media is impacting the ecommerce industry, we analyzed data from 37 million social media visits that led to 529,000 orders.

Have you built a loyal following around your products? Have you been gaining followers steadily on social media? Already consistently putting out great content on your blog?

Then maybe it's time to move on to video marketing.

Video adds a whole new dimension to your marketing mix. Done properly, you can use video to add depth to your product’s features and stories, tell the history of how your company has come to be, or explain how your product might be used in ways that can’t be captured in web copy or in print. And that translates to more sales. According to MultiVisionDigital, a video production company, consumers are 64% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video.

When your product is just too cool, or you want to make sure that people really get the best use out of it, it’s time to grab a camera.

Before we get too deep into the specifics of video and YouTube marketing, it’s important to understand that you don’t need a viral hit to see results. You’re telling a story about yourself or your products, not producing a viral hit for personal fame. Focus on engagement, not on simply getting a huge number of views.

In a future post we’ll share some common traits of compelling videos produced by ecommerce businesses. In the meantime, here are YouTube strategies that get views.