It is no fresh news to tell that people are on social media all the time, all day long. And the majority if not all of these people are customers and consumers and can be potential customers. Many of these people click on the brand and company posts on social media and often make purchases.
The chief strategy officer of Elastic Path, Darin Archer, comments: “Social commerce is becoming increasingly popular for brands.”
“Even when the transaction itself may be happening outside the app, there’s a much smaller gap between discovery and purchase. It makes it easy for shoppers to transact when they’re already thinking about your ad.”
Archer discusses the effectivity of a social media commerce strategy, comparing it the conventional ecommerce. He believes the efficiency of the first one comes from the fact that relying on social commerce is better than “counting on the shopper to remember the ad or the product later when they’re shopping in-store”.
He adds: “You’re streamlining the shopping process for consumers by making browsing and transacting more connected - in many cases, drastically reducing the time between the peak of purchase intent and the ability to complete a transaction.”
The whole point is that people are already spending so much of their time on social media, so there wouldn’t be too much of a big step if they start shopping when they are already on social media. It is more convenient and quick for people, while it is a new opportunity for brands and companies to make sales through a new channel.
The group director for social strategy at Digits, Liz Cole, observes the current trend: “Social media has always been an important gateway to making purchase decisions. Research has shown that more than half of consumers have purchased a product after seeing it recommended by someone the follow on social channels, and nearby seventy-five percent have purchased a product after first seeing it in a brand’s own social post.”
Social media platforms are quickly adapting to this new trend and the growing number of consumers getting more and more used to this new type of e-commerce through social media channels. Cole comments that social platforms are “building out more and better commerce functionality, from shoppable tags to product catalog-enabled ads to transactional chatbots”.
Liz Cole adds that: “As the path from post to purchase shortens, people’s openness to discovering new products and buying them directly through social channels has also expanded to include categories of products – like mattresses or prescription medications – that previously weren’t commonly purchased online at all.”
The main reason for the success of social media commerce comes from the fact that this strategy allows for creating the sense of integrity and continuity across all social media and communication channels a brand is using and utilizing. Archer comments that: “To succeed in selling through social media, brands will need to figure out how to effectively integrate the social commerce experience with existing touchpoints, like mobile and Web. They should also ensure that the brand experience within an app is specifically tailored to that touchpoint. The checkout experience for social commerce should be relevant to that context rather than just a desktop experience repurposed for social. The customer shouldn’t notice any change to their experience as they move through the purchase journey.”
Another one of the main advantages of social media commerce is the sense of loyalty that the brand builds up over time with its customer base. Therefore, to utilize the sense of loyalty for the goals of social media commerce, it is important for brands to be able to maintain the products’ or services’ quality, make sure that products and services are competitively priced, according to Mousumi Behari, digital strategy practice lead at Avionos.
According to Behari: “Given the visual nature of social media, small format videos are becoming increasingly popular to create a storyline and impact the brand.” Behari also comments the role of influencers for social media commerce, adding that: “They already have a likability factor, and customers will trust what they are selling. Brands are having success with this approach, such as Nike with Kobe Bryant, or Puma with Selena Gomez”. Influencers indeed play a very important and essential role for the success of social media commerce and sales. They act as the conduit between both worlds – the one of social media connectivity and the one of shopping.
Behari explains that one of the main advantages of social media and how it can benefit e-commerce is connectivity and communication.
“Creating a two-way conversation on social media is also improving customer retention. We see massive brands like Target servicing their customers in the comment section and meeting the user where they are. Retailers should allocate money to market in these platforms. The interactions on social media feel personalized, and since the customer is able to curate their feed, chances are they are seeing sponsored ads to similar products of people they already follow.”
However, social media commerce is not something that happened overnight. It is more like a process that constantly grows and evolves, adding more and more new channels, platforms, and methodologies. The trend is going to continue in future, for sure, and there will be more and more ways enabling consumers to buy instantly, while on social media platforms, as noted by the senior manager at Influencer Matchmaker, Amelia Neate. She comments that: “I predict more social feeds will be integrated on websites. For example, DFS has begun introducing integrated Instagram feeds on their website, which helps show their products in situ. Encouraging a purchase, buyers can see how a piece is styled and how it may look and feel in their homes.”
Rachael Samuels is a manager for social media at Sprout Social and according to her, brands are now challenged to find new and more innovative ways for communicating and interacting with customers, connecting with them in the context of social media commerce.
“As social media commerce continues to grow, brands will need to humanize themselves by creating content their audience can relate to and identify with. In the year ahead, I expect to see more e-commerce brands leveraging micro-influencer partnerships, integrating social shopping experiences across multiple platforms, and finding creative ways to empower audiences to sell for them, such as turning honest customer feedback into distributable content.”
It is foreseen by many professionals in the field that social media commerce will continue to grow and people will continue getting used to the idea and more comfortable with making purchases. As Brian Walker, chief strategy officer at Bloomreach, comments: “Certainly we will likely see these platforms continue to grow in influence over shopping and buying, including high-consideration categories like real estate. For example, in the future we could see real estate listings on Snapchat’s Snap Map feature.”
Furthermore, more in-app transactions are expected to happen in the upcoming year. Archer comments that: “I see the in-app transaction experience as the next step for social commerce. Linking to an external e-commerce site begins to monetize the browsing experience, but it’s not as seamless as it could be. To create that ease-of-purchase, brands will need to move the actual transaction into the social app. We already see this with Instagram’s Checkout function, and this will cause a ripple effect with other brands making the move to support in-app transactions.”
Archer summarizes that: “As social commerce evolves, it will be important for brands to understand that they must offer consumers full shopping experience, even when the consumers are clicking and buying on the go. A brand’s future social commerce experience will need to communicate with all other commerce touchpoints, like the Web store, to facilitate seamless transactions. Otherwise, you’ll lose shopper engagement.”