Social Commerce Is On The Rise
What is social commerce? Social commerce enables shoppers to use social networks to make eCommerce transactions. The number of networks entering this area is growing and they are enabling fresh new ways for the shopping experience to happen.
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Social Commerce In Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook
These three social networks have recently introduced functionality that enables buying actions.
• Facebook Marketplace enables peer-to-peer buying and selling.
• Pinterest introduced buyable pins
• Instagram has shoppable photos in posts so that you can buy as you scroll the feed.
Vote in the social commerce poll (closes 1st march 2018):
Preparing For Social Commerce
Social commerce is taking the role of social media to the next level for many brands. They open up new possibilities for revenue from existing social accounts. However, to take full advantage needs some planning beforehand. Think about the process, people, organization etc.
Forrester research has a process for this. A four-step approach to strategically add social media to marketing goals. Using a process such as this enables brands to create a list of actions that must be completed to enable success and in turn minimize issues.
People:
Understand your target audience. It really does not matter too much how you do this stage. Make sure that it happens and do not use the assumptions of your sales team. There are many online social behaviors that your potential customers have that many traditional sales people have no idea about. Understanding the preferred channels and most active days and time slots and other characteristics of your target audience will make a big difference to your social commerce results.
Objectives:
Understanding what the objectives are before starting is important. Project objectives must align with the top level business objectives.
Strategy:
What tactics are needed to ensure the objectives are achieved? This is especially relevant to move customers through the customer life cycle. Starting a new social commerce project might lead to checks that your customer support process can handle the extra enquiries coming from social channels. Maybe your social commerce project will become the catalyst to get your virtual assistant or chatbot project going. The final use case for approval it was waiting for.
Technology:
This is the last aspect to look at, and will be impacted by the information obtained in the “people” part of the process. Budget and alignment and fit to the existing digital and IT landscape within the organization will lead to the choice of technology. Reporting must be double checked that it will measure the metrics that can track success. Furthermore, do not settle for proxies and the easy to track metrics. I have been there and I have the T-shirt and it is not worth having 😉
So now ask yourself this question. Do you want a slice of the social commerce pie or do you want to watch your entrepreneurial competitors eating your share of the pie?
Timeline Of Social Commerce
Here is an infographic by 16Best.net that shows how social commerce is developing among the various social networks.
ebay discount and https://www.16best.net/ebay
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Clive, Amazing how much more power Twitter has and it’s probably the least utilized by most businesses. Thanks for sharing about this one!
Hi Lisa. Most people are surprised at the results, especially in the poll. There were many Twitter warriors that voted that Twitter just had to be top when it came to social commerce. Twitter is still seen by many companies as an awareness vehicle, and in many ways that is true but it can do far more. I do believe (from my own experience) that the targeting engine has let Twitter down in past years. You cannot do social commerce if the targeting is off. However, after spending time with the great folks at Twitter NL, I see that Twitter is getting better and better at providing better targeting. This will only boost Twitter social commerce effectiveness.