Despite the hype around the newly introduced social media “Buy” buttons and other shopping links, social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram continue to attract only a meagre portion of entire online retail sales.

In fact, based on the Custora E-commerce Pulse Holidata Report, lesser than only two percent of the entire e-commerce sales were attributed to social media this past holiday season.

While many more marketing channels have observed significant year-over-year enhancement, the percentage of online orders via the social media has actually decreased from the last year.

The bottom line of the matter is that when the question of sales drive emerges, marketers have to unlock the formula how to produce the real results from social-media. While debate may still high on whether the social media will live up to the hype, the following are some of the best practices for marketers who are looking to optimize their returning phase on social media.

Take Advantage of the Functionality of Advanced Facebook Ads

The advertising solution offered by Facebook offers a number of advanced features beside the ad’s automated distribution and it is for the best interest of the marketers. It is in their best interest for learning and implementing some of the better advanced functionalities offered by Facebook.

Facebook’s Custom Audiences lets the marketers for matching their house lists against the Facebook data for yielding more targeted and relevant marketing messages to consumers.

Take up your Custom Audience Ads at the next level using the Facebook’s Audience Insights. This is often-overlooked feature that lets you drill down to the specific personas and segments of your custom audience.

Take for example, for the ad creative features of a new version of women’s yoga pants, you may have the desire for targeting the customers who have bought the athletic wears, then you need to drill down still the women who have enlisted yoga as an interest on their Facebook page. This feature allows the marketers for effectively segmentise their customers for providing hyper-relevant contents and move single step closer for achieving the reality of one-to-one marketing.

Enable Your Fans and Customers for Telling Your Story

The important lesson here for the marketers: Rather than spending your time in pinning (or tweeting or posting or snapping) yourself, put the resources for making it as simplified and fun as is possible for your fans to do. The resultant impact of tweets from your customers is very likely to drive in higher sales.

Instagram is popularising the app marketingmedium. Both the Pinterest and Instagram run social media contests for encouraging the fans to highlight or post the social mentions from your fans on the website