Socialising commerce - Selling with social media
If your company is selling products or services online, the biggest challenge is to grab the attention of your target audience. The next obstacle is to reduce the “friction” so that they can buy your product/service without much effort. The more hoops your customer has to jump through, the more likely they are to drop off and not come back. It is vital that they can buy from you right where they see you.
Now imagine if they were to come across your ad on social media, like your product and could buy it right there. This is precisely what social commerce is all about. It combines the user presence and “stickiness” of social media with the ability to shop, previously restricted to online storefronts only. Click To Tweet
As you must have guessed by now, social commerce relies on creating a smooth, seamless experience for the user wherein the gap between the discovery of a product and its purchase is reduced as close to zero as possible. Rather than the customer going to shop, the shop goes to the customer. What makes social commerce particularly enticing from a marketer’s point of view is that it is a natural extension of the advertising tools already offered by social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc. Brands can build attractive content to engage with customers, except that the engagement does not stop with watching the content, but instead proceeds to purchase as a part of the same workflow. In the past couple of years, brick and mortar stores have aggressively adopted eCommerce and social media presence. These vendors typically do not have expertise in setting up and maintaining online marketplaces. Social commerce comes in as a boon for them, especially since many social media platforms themselves offer tools to create online shops. For example, Facebook offers Facebook Shops.
However, to successfully adapt social commerce for your business, a couple of factors need to be kept in mind. First and foremost, the right social media platform needs to be chosen depending on your target audience. For example, if you are targeting teenagers, you will be better off choosing Instagram as compared to Facebook. Secondly, you need to reach the consumer where they are most comfortable, for example, while scrolling through their news feed. If they come across you as a part of their daily flow, they are more likely to engage and purchase. Up next is reducing friction (as we discussed before) and not offering big-ticket purchases. The smaller the cost is, the less likely the user is to hesitate before spending. Social commerce can be used to draw in the customer with smaller purchases and lead them on to bigger engagements.
Let’s put the “social” in social commerce so that the “commerce” works for you.
Used properly, social commerce offers many benefits with fewer efforts spent on setting up the e-commerce infrastructure.