The invention of social media resulted in many users becoming addicted to social media. An average person tends to spend about 2-3 hours a day on various social media platforms.
Noticing the shifting trends in the e-commerce industry, businesses too started adopting several other means to target their customers. This has given rise to the most result-driven social media marketing strategy—Social Commerce, also known as Social Shopping.
If you are new to this concept, consider this blog as a guide to give you a clear understanding of Social commerce and how it can completely change the way you can target your potential customers and generate sales.
What Is Social Commerce?
Social Commerce means to promote or sell products or services through various social media platforms. Social Commerce enables the users to discover their preferred products, look at the specifications, and purchase the products in a few clicks without leaving the platform.
Almost every social media platform has enabled the social commerce feature. Be it the famous Shoppable Instagram feature, the Facebook shop, or Pinterest’s buyable pins, Social commerce is gradually becoming famous amongst marketers due to its spectacular benefits, and shoppers who like to enjoy shopping while enjoying a social experience preferred social media platforms.
Here are some of the major benefits of social commerce:
Bring In Authentic Engagement
The success of an e-commerce brand can be judged on the basis of the engagement level of the customers.
Since social commerce involves a social media platform, it gives brands and businesses an opportunity to communicate with their potential customers.
Social commerce gives space to interaction as customers react to the posts by liking, commenting, tagging their friends, sharing, and direct messaging the brands.
Moreover, it helps brands in creating a close relationship with the customers on a personal level.
Additionally, the content that you upload on your social media can influence the engagement of your customers. By creating engaging posts like quizzes, a customer appreciation post, or posts displaying limited offers and discounts, you can further push the engagement level of your audience.
Enhance the Experience of Your Customers
Through Social Commerce, you can provide a seamless and frictionless shopping experience to your customers. By using this method, the customers will easily purchase their favorite products in a few taps and clicks.
Since social commerce enables the users to complete the transaction without leaving the platform, it leads to an overall satisfactory and happy shopping experience.
Moreover, through social commerce people enjoy as much as they would while street or window shopping. Social commerce allows people to go through the reviews and recommendations of other users before going ahead and purchasing a product. This gives them a more clear picture of the products including their style and quality.
Target People Worldwide
Social media has no geographical boundaries, and it is an ever-active platform. Social commerce enables you to target your customers residing in any part of the world. Due to active social media users worldwide, you will be able to target more customers more effectively and efficiently.
More so, social media never sleeps which means the users would be open to asking queries or knowing more details about your products and services continuously which provides you a better scope of interaction with your audience and targeting your potential customers at all times.
Increased Customer Loyalty
One known fact is that one customer always tends to trust another customer more than what the brand publishes for its promotion.
Social commerce involves users going through the content created by the users and when they read positive reviews and feedbacks, they are compelled to put their faith in the brand that increases customer loyalty and trust.
By using the content created by your customers, you certainly can give them reason enough to put their faith in your brand and to instill loyalty in your existing customers, and further target your potential customers more effectively and efficiently.
Social Commerce = Impulsive Shopping
Social Commerce raises the urge within your customers to purchase more products. The majority of customers on social media mainly use the platforms to take shopping inspiration.
When your customers see your displayed products in such a scenario, they may get compelled to purchase since they are already in a mindset to purchase.
Give Your Customers an Easy and Seamless Checkout Process
One of the major highlights of social commerce is that it offers a quick, easy, and smooth checkout process to the customers without them having to leave the platform.
The normal way of completing a transaction involves redirecting the customers to the website, fill in multiple lengthy and boring details and finally make the payment to complete the process.
Whereas, in social commerce, the customers simply have to click on the Buy button and make the payment in a few clicks to complete the transaction.
This process is much simpler and efficient than the normal e-commerce transaction completion process.
Get Recommended by Your Customers
Once you have happy and satisfied customers, they would surely recommend you to others through their social media handles which results in your brand gaining more popularity.
Social commerce is a great way to increase word-of-mouth marketing. If your customers are excited about your brand and happy to try out your products, then they would surely spread the word about your brand and tag you into their social media posts that would create content that works in your favor and would help you in increasing your clientele by targetting your audience better.
Strategies to Adopt for Successful Social Commerce
Since you are now well acquainted with the benefits of social commerce, in this section, we shall be telling you about the top strategies that you can use to boost your sales using social commerce.
Choose the Best Social Media Platform
First things first, you need to identify the social media platform that works best according to the overall vibe of your brand. You need to select a social media platform that works best for you and is in accordance with the products of your brand and your business.
If your brand caters to fashion, photography, home decor, accessories, or an aesthetically pleasing niche, then you can consider visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest that offer major shopping inspiration to its users due to their visually appealing and vibrant vibe.
If you are more towards technology, gadgets, software, or some other similar niche, then you can consider the other platforms like Facebook and Twitter to perform better and target more audiences.
In any case, you also need to study the timings when your target audience is most active and look for inspirations.
Collaborate With Influencers
Influencers are addressed as influencers for a reason! There are many famous influencers on various social media platforms, and to increase your sales, you can send across a few products to them for promoting your products.
By creating a post or video featuring your products, their followers may be interested in looking into your product, and as a result, they might buy your product or at least follow your page to know more about your brand and products.
Highlight Your Bestselling Products
While promoting your products on social media, you need to display your best-selling products since your potential customers would be apprehensive about going ahead and purchasing.
Highlighting a product that your existing customers have loved will convince your potential customers to buy the product.
Create Good Quality Content
Being a part of social media and while promoting and selling your products on social media, you also need to make sure that you provide relevant, correct, and high-quality content to your users.
As mentioned above, people get more attracted and engaged with content that is engaging enough and relevant.
For instance – if you are a clothing brand, you can give other fashion-related tips like the shoes that would suit the attire best or some information about the accessories that would look best. Such additional information will hold the attention of the customers for a longer period of time and they would involve and connect with your content better.
Analyze Your Performance
Lastly, If you are trying to create a brand presence on social media, you need to make sure that you keep track of your performance.
You need to analyze every conversion, be it the traffic being redirected to your eCommerce website from your social media or vice versa, be it your new followers or the number of likes, comments, views, etc.
All information is extremely crucial and helps in better understanding of your target audience and also assists in proper planning for future campaigns.
Closing Note
Social Commerce is the integration of eCommerce with social media platforms and enables the users to scroll through their social media feeds and purchase simultaneously.
Ever since Social commerce has come into the limelight, it has gained a lot of attention from businesses and shoppers.
We are now hopeful that you must have understood the concept of Social Commerce along with its incredible benefits and the strategies you need to adapt to reap maximum benefits. Being an eCommerce brand, you need to utilize the power of social commerce in your business to stay ahead of your competitors!