Social Selling: Strategies and Examples (2026)

Social selling uses trust built through personal connections to sell products or services. At its core is one goal: to build a trusting, organic connection with potential customers.

A 2025 Shopify survey found 35% of store owners named building a social presence as their most common first-year growth strategy.* It makes sense, as 44% of shoppers use social media to research brands before making a purchase.

This guide shares how to manage social media, with a social selling strategy and examples of brands who’ve implemented one.

What is social selling?

Social selling is the use of social media platforms to locate, connect with, and nurture potential customers. It relies on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The goal is to engage with prospects, provide them with valuable content, and establish credibility.

A social selling program is different from social commerce, which focuses on pushing products to customers. The idea is to share relevant content, engage with prospect consumers, build personal brands, and monitor social conversations.

Benefits of social selling

Social selling offers benefits to sellers promoting a professional brand or their own personal brand:

Build trust with your target market

Communicating with your customers helps build a personal relationship with them. Sprout Social found two-thirds of consumers connect this relationship with brand trust.

The same applies to influencers. BBB National Programs found 58% of consumers have made purchases because of influencer endorsements, but only 5% trust influencer content completely. FTC-compliant disclosures are required: Four in five of those surveyed name influencers who are not genuine or transparent as what breaks their trust.

Long-term rewards

Social selling doesn’t aim for impulse purchases. It steadily and progressively builds relationships with potential clients, and it maintains those relationships after they become paying customers.

Anthony Barresi credits Pasta Life’s growth to a series of small, consistent efforts, including a creative video series titled How Italian Are You?

“The intention wasn’t about converting people,” Anthony tells Shopify Masters. “It was about welcoming them into the brand in a creative way.”

Relevant insight into your customer base

Social listening tools like Mention and Brandwatch pick up on conversations that users are already having about your brand. They pick up more than the chats you’re directly tagged in to judge overall customer sentiment.

Companies can use this information to shape future social media marketing campaigns, develop new product designs, and refine product descriptions.

You can also pick up on competitor mentions to establish your brand voice and differentiate your own content.

“Today, with social media and direct-to-consumer channels, customers will immediately call out anything that feels inauthentic,” says Michael Petri, co-founder and designer at Golden West Boots, in a Shopify Masters interview. “They can spot an interloper from a mile away. The only way to create products that truly resonate is to understand their world from the inside.”

Which social platform should you sell on?

Facebook is the most popular platform for social media users to make purchases through, followed by Instagram. Choosing the best social media selling platforms for you comes down to an honest self-assessment of your brand.

Some of the main social selling tools to consider include:

Tips for social selling success

What distinguishes social selling from traditional advertising is a trusting connection with your audience. Here are some social selling best practices and tips to keep in mind:

Set up a profile that sells

Identify the social media platforms that your audience uses through market research. A post-purchase feedback survey sent with Shopify Messaging can uncover this insight with one question: “Where did you hear about us?”

Create a business account on those platforms. Add the basics—your logo, brand name, bio, and website link—to your social media profile.

Organic bedding brand Coyuchi shows what this looks like in practice. They also use Instagram Story highlights to extend the lifespan of their content (stories only last for 24 hours) and introduce new profile visitors to the brand.

Find the right buyers, not the most

There are 5.4 billion social media users worldwide, but not every one will be your brand’s target customer. Hone in on the people who seem truly engaged as part of your social sales strategy.

“Good content is always created for a couple of people, not for everybody,” says direct-to-consumer (DTC) expert Nik Sharma in a Shopify Masters interview. “You really think of no more than four people that you’re trying to sell to.”

Shopify Audiences builds on this with unique insights from commerce data to create custom audience lists across Meta, Pinterest, TikTok, Google, and Snapchat. Fashion brand Mac Duggal used it to double their retargeting audience size and reduce cost per purchase by 3.6 times.

What to post, and how often

The optimal frequency and best time to post on social media depends on the platform. Buffer’s data shows:

Note that these are optimal timings based on data from social media tools. Experiment with different schedules to find out what your audience responds to.

Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn have their own native scheduling features to help manage your social content calendar. Platforms like Buffer, Later, and Hootsuite can schedule posts on multiple platforms from one dashboard.

Listen first, sell later

Keep tabs on what your audience talks about on social media, whether that’s trending topics or questions they’d like answered. You can do this through:

• Brand alerts
• Reddit or community monitoring
• Weekly comment and DM reviews

Odd Bunch Founder Divy Ojha took this approach before launching the brand’s food subscription service. He joined two Facebook groups—one for vegans, the other for moms—and shared their food waste mission and cost saving benefits for either demographic.

“The majority of the first 87 people that signed up in that 10-day activation period, 80%, came from those groups,” Divy tells Shopify Masters.

Build trusting relationships

Engage in relevant conversations and listen to new customers about their needs and current pain points, then use those interactions to build stronger relationships.

“I still to this day answer as many DMs as I can,” says Lindsey Carter, founder of apparel brand Set Active, in a Shopify Masters interview. “I think being able to feel connected to me as a founder makes people feel special.”

To build on those relationships:

• Set up a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help track customers, build segments, and offer personalized communication.
• Use cohort analytics in your Shopify dashboard to check in on customers.
• Trial customer retention strategies to drive repeat purchases and word-of-mouth marketing.
• Launch a customer loyalty program, using apps like Smile or LoyaltyLion, to reward shoppers for their purchases.

Turn an online conversation into an order

Social networks have messaging features to help followers chat with your brand directly. Meta found that over 72% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that offer this type of messaging service. Almost three-quarters say the option makes them trust a brand more.

Jewelry and accessory brand Heaven Mayhem’s founder Pia Mance tells Shopify Masters how they spark conversations.

“As soon as someone clicked on the thing and liked a post, I would DM them straight away like, ‘Hey, saw you liked it. Are you interested in purchasing it?’” says Pia. “I was after every sale, really wanting to connect with every single person.”

While engaging with customers directly can be valuable, automation can help handle a large volume of social media DMs. Spur, for example, lets you set up automated triggers when someone mentions a keyword within an Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp message. It retrieves accurate product data from your Shopify admin within those conversations. Combine this with a draft order link to divert shoppers towards checkout.

Social media followers may have questions about products before they place an order. Continue the live chat experience with Shopify Inbox, which lets buyers interact with an AI-powered sales associate on your website.

Use social media analytics

All major social media platforms have native analytics tools, including Instagram Insights and TikTok Analytics. These dashboards show:

• Audience demographics, including their age, gender, and location breakdown
• Profile views and how those people found your account
• Content metrics: reach, impressions, and engagement rate
• Follower growth over time

Combine social media reports with website activity to see what happens when social-referred traffic arrives at your online store. Shopify’s prebuilt marketing reports gather this data for you. Ask the AI assistant Sidekick to help you interpret and act on this data.

For example, you could ask Sidekick to:

• Analyze which social media platform drives customers with the highest lifetime value
• Segment customers who arrived from Instagram and create a 20%-off discount with the code INSTAGRAM20
• Suggest a product bundle of items most popular with TikTok visitors

Social selling examples

Here are two examples of Shopify brands whose social selling strategies paid off:

Last Crumb: Scarcity marketing over paid social ads

Baked goods company Last Crumb applies the product drop model, often associated with streetwear brands, to a surprising niche: cookies. Their social selling strategy hinged on founder Derek Jaeger’s experience running an affiliate ads agency.

“If you turned off the ads, there’d be no brand left,” Derek says in a Shopify Masters interview. “These products would just disappear into thin air. Sure, if you’re spending 10 or 20 grand a day, they’re going to do well—but that’s not a brand. That’s a faucet.”

Instead, Last Crumb launched limited drops. One hundred boxes dropped every Monday at midday, with a scarcity strategy that even hooked influencers.

“Chrissy Teigen got her hands on a box really early and posted it organically,” says Derek. “That’s something we pride ourselves on—we’ve always had organic influence for the brand. And that blew us up.”

Lone Fox: Building influence before launch

Drew Scott’s entrepreneur journey started at age 11. He’s launched multiple businesses over the years, including home décor brand Lone Fox—the idea of which came from the audience he’d grown on YouTube.

Drew built a community of 1.7 million YouTube subscribers for Lone Fox by regularly posting DIY projects.

“The first thing I started doing was making YouTube videos and connecting with an audience—reading their comments, seeing what they liked about my projects, noting what I could maybe sell in the future,” Drew tells Shopify Masters.

This YouTube community became Lone Fox’s built-in focus group.

“Over time, I built a community and started sharing some of my ideas for a product line, and it was just this really natural evolution,” Drew says.

*Based on a 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.