Social Commerce as Marketing Tool
Social commerce is the intersection where content meets conversions.
The line between social media and commerce becomes increasingly blurred. With more platforms offering bigger opportunities for brands to turn digital consumers’ obsession with social media and aesthetically pleasing images and videos into seamless shopping experience, social commerce is the intersection where content meets conversions.
Brands’ ultimate goals are to increase conversions and eventually revenue, so understandably, not using tools that social media could provide, i.e. tapping into e-commerce platform or CTA buttons, seems like a complete waste of opportunity. Added to the fact is people, especially younger generations, spent most of their time on social media apps, Hootsuite reported. The two combination makes social commerce as the indisputable powerful marketing tool.
Social Media and Shopping Behavior
Thanks to the continual and lucrative rise of mobile shopping and influencer marketing, digital consumers are swapping their traditional shopping experience to a more modern approach. Instead of scrolling through countless feeds on the retailer’s websites, today’s consumers prefer to tune into social networks such as Instagram or Pinterest to discover and make their purchases. Moreover, online reviews and recommendations also served as critical factors that influence consumer’s purchasing decisions.
On top of that, statistics show that Generation Z are connected online near-constantly, primarily on social networks and they are in fact on track to become the largest consumer generation on the planet. Therefore, it’s only natural for forward thinking brands to start implementing social commerce into their marketing portfolio.
Social Commerce Marketing
It’s clear with the rising importance of social commerce, many of today’s social networks have put more effort into integrating seamless shopping experience into their platforms. Here are some examples how brands could tap into this emerging marketing trend.
Instagram is definitely on the fast track to become one of the most powerful social commerce platforms. Ever since the introduction of shoppable tags back in 2016, Instagram has ever since constantly re-equipped its platforms with new features that are quite blatantly favorable for e-commerce brands.
Enabling Instagram shopping and creating a clickable feed is one of the most effective ways to increase brands’ selling opportunities on social media. Marketers can give followers quick access to product pricing and details on Instagram simply by tagging the products in their feeds or posts. Not only that, they can also do the same with Instagram Stories stickers.
Another way brands can leverage Instagram for an effective social commerce strategy is by creating valuable CTAs. Apart from adding direct CTAs on regular posts, brands can also add CTAs in their Instagram Stories. The “Swipe Up” or “Learn More” call to action can easily help brands drive traffic and sell products.
Lastly, brands can collaborate with influencers to advertise their products on Instagram. 75% of Instagram users visit a website or explore a company’s shop after seeing a branded post promoted by influencers on the social platform.
While Instagram was built on the spontaneously shared moments, Pinterest focuses on targeted and well edited pieces of content.
An important part of Pinterest’s social commerce experience are Rich Pins, which basically are pins that provide additional information. Brands can leverage the pins to provide customers with important information such as stock availability, size, or price, which can significantly improve their click-through rates and visibility. Brands can also leverage price notification for personalized email notification, which could prompt prospective customers to buy the said-product.
Just like Instagram, Pinterest’s Shop the Look feature offers brands the chance to post pictures with tags and links that can direct customers to a landing page where users can buy the items directly. Not only that, Pinterest can automatically add personalized shopping recommendations, which are extremely useful to design a more targeted marketing campaign.
With its huge user database, effective hyper-targeting options combined with buy buttons and other calls to action on ads, Facebook is one of the marketers’ favorite choices for social commerce.
For one, brands can leverage Facebook Marketplace to further boost brand awareness and fuel customers’ existing desire to make online purchases. Marketplace has a powerful search filter that lets users filters and limit results by category, price and, best of all, location.
Another way is to leverage Facebook Payment. With the introduction of peer-to-peer money exchange via Messenger, brands can add buy buttons to ads that link to their Messenger bots and accept native payments from customers within Messenger.
Embracing Social Commerce
For every social media marketers or entrepreneurs, undeniably, increasing ROI is the ultimate goal of any marketing strategies. Social commerce is the combination of social media and commerce, a powerful tool that enables brands to streamline the buying process whilst amplifying the effectiveness of social advertising.
We appreciate your claps!
