Social commerce has been quickly growing throughout the marketing world. Marketers all around the globe are tapping into its potential and delivering better experiences for the audiences, as well as their own bottom lines, with the help of this innovation.
Social media usage continues to increase, and as each platform develops and innovates, brands are finding ways to sell their products directly to those users without having to take them out of the platform. That means more conversions, and fewer items forever left in a cart.
If you want to tempt your consumers to buy products and improve your brand's conversion rate, then it's high time to implement a social commerce plan for your brand.
This article will lay out the meaning of social commerce, its benefits, what platforms or tools you can use for implementing social commerce plans, and a few examples of the brands that have found success.
Let's dive into it!
What Is Social Commerce?
Brands and businesses have transformed social media platforms into shopping malls. Selling products or services directly from the social media networks without getting navigated to any other official website or browser, this flourishing shopping activity is known as social commerce.
In simple terms, social commerce is the process of purchasing a product or service on social media platforms. Brands empower the audiences and their users to buy the product directly from the social media platform where they first discovered the deal. This strategy offers an easy and uninterrupted buying experience to the customer, making it a valuable asset for both marketers and consumers.
Business Benefits of Social Commerce
Numerous businesses have already started practicing social commerce on their different social media platforms and making profits on a larger scale.
However, if you’re still wondering how social commerce will benefit your brand or business, then you are at the right place! These are some of the things that social commerce can help your brand accomplish.
Boost traffic and engagement
To increase your brand's conversion rate, it is important to reach the maximum targeted audience through social media platforms. By implementing a social commerce plan in your business strategy, you’re creating content that’s more likely to be interacted with, which helps you increase the brand's awareness and visibility.
Social media platforms allow your users or visitors to get in touch with your brand easily. Social commerce not only enables this, but a delightful experience of the customer with your brand will also make them recommend your brand to others as well, resulting in increased engagement and organic traffic on your website.
Grow your audience
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have huge user bases that are still increasing. Businesses can grow only when you identify your target audience, influence them on their preferred platform, connect with them, and then sell them a product or service.
If you’re able to do a good job of targeting the right audience on a particular platform, you can steadily grow by getting your channel and products in front of the right people and delivering what they want. Social commerce eases this process by offering customers a seamless buying experience.
Analyze ROI
A social commerce strategy, if planned and implemented in a polished way, will acquire a positive and improved return of investment. On business social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, they have in-built analytics features to help make sure you’re monitoring your campaign, and a tool like Socialbakers analytics can go even deeper when it comes to measuring social media marketing ROI.
You can gain insights on engagement rate like which content type is performing better comparatively, views for your feed in past few days or months, click-through rate for your Shoppable posts, and more.
Best Social Commerce Platforms to Use
You can plan and implement your social commerce strategy through a social commerce platform.
These are the platforms and features that can help make that happen:
Instagram Shopping
This is arguably the place where social commerce has had the biggest impact. If you have an Instagram Business account, you can tag a product so that users can easily see its price, details like colors or availability, and follow the link to see more about it within the platform. As a user, it’s a great, smooth buying experience that’s improving as Instagram continues to get better.
To make your Instagram feed or stories shoppable, your brand must have a business account on Instagram and your Facebook business page must be linked to your Instagram business account. If it’s available in your region, be sure to try out the augmented reality try-it-on feature.
Facebook Shops
Facebook Shops is a digital shopping platform created to accommodate both Facebook and Instagram Shopping. You can set up a Facebook shop for your brand or business effortlessly, prepare your product inventory, and then choose the product you want to showcase.
After selecting the products from the inventory, you can personalize the catalog's look, and then you can embed those shoppable feeds on Facebook directly.
Pinterest Buyable Pins
Similar to Instagram Shopping, Pinterest has buyable pins that allow brands to tag products to the posts and users can shop the tagged products directly from these posts.
A US survey showed that 47% of Pinterest users logged on for the primary purpose of shopping, which was more than 4x higher than most other social media platforms. That’s an attentive audience actively searching for social commerce, and the best part is that users don’t need to leave Pinterest to complete the buying process.
Snapchat
Snapchat’s definition of social commerce involves trying on a pair of shoes from wherever you are.
Snapchat’s augmented reality allows users to try on shoes in different colors to see how they would look in real life. With more wardrobe AR affects upcoming, it’s betting that this try-on feature will help it stand out in the area of social commerce, although Instagram also has a try-on feature for sunglasses and makeup.
Taggbox Commerce
Taggbox Commerce is a user-generated content platform that helps you curate social content, tag products to make it shoppable, and embed it on your website.
The Taggbox commerce tool simplifies the process of converting your curated user-generated content into the shoppable UGC or shoppable posts through which the users can directly buy the product or the complete look displayed in the post.
With the help of Taggbox Commerce, you can easily tag the product, its specifics, and the price of the product to the selected piece of content. You can embed that feed on your official website, any social media platform, or any other digital platform so that your users can buy the product instantly without any hassle.
Bazaarvoice (formerly Curalate)
Bazaarvoice is also a social commerce platform that can help you in remodeling your posts, stories, or feeds into shoppable content.
It can help your brand implement a successful social commerce strategy to drive desired results using its Like2Buy or Fanreel features.
Best Social Commerce Examples
If you haven’t tried out some of these social commerce options yet, get some inspiration from a few brands that have made it work for them:
Jordan
The launch of the special edition Air Jordan III 'Tinker' shoes is one of the best examples of implementing social commerce.
Jordan affiliated with Snapchat to make the launch a success, empower the brand's sale and strength by optimizing a sale in some circumscribed area near the ground where the game was played.
Kate Spade
Showcasing a different medium of social commerce, Kate Spade designed shoppable videos to showcase their clothes, and at the end of the video there was a direct shoppable link to purchase the product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA6zVNTe9OU
H&M
One of the most popular brands globally, H&M is using social commerce in perfection with their shoppable Instagram feed. They have used the product tagging features perfectly to make their brand posts and UGC shoppable.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CIDWWMqB\_fi/
The Takeaway
Social media has the power to attract maximum audiences towards your brand. In this competitive world, it becomes essential that you follow best practices to grab and keep your customers.
This blend of social media platforms and ecommerce is helping brands achieve their goals by making the purchase process so much easier for their customers. If your brand hasn’t yet taken advantage of the rise of social commerce, what are you waiting for?
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
