The best social-commerce strategies for your business will take into consideration a number of factors, including but not limited to your target demographic, your existing social-media presence, and what, exactly, you’re trying to sell. Sometimes, the best social-commerce strategy for a brand isn’t even purely social commerce: Social selling, the act of using social media to sell products or services on a separate site or channel, can be another great way to target customers, says Myers. What’s most important is figuring out what tactics will resonate most with your desired audience.

Here’s how you can make the most of on-platform checkout and social selling to meet your customers where they are: on social media.

Strategize your on-platform selling approach

Some products are easier to sell directly on social media than others. A low-cost product that doesn’t require a lot of research — cheap sunglasses, for instance — will have a much different buyer journey than a pricey pair of shoes. “Understanding the input that a customer needs to make a decision determines whether you should do social commerce,” Myers explains. Ultimately, not every product or service will be a fit for on-platform selling or even social commerce: A person is unlikely to book a hotel stay through Instagram, for instance.

But brands that push their most accessible products on social will likely see results. Image Skincare, a Palm Beach, Florida-based professional skincare line, found particular success promoting its $55 eye masks through on-platform shopping on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok; the product drove 20 percent of all traffic from its social shops on Facebook and Instagram to Image Skincare’s own website. The product’s success on social platforms is likely a result of its accessibility, explains Image chief marketing officer Yaso Murray; a visual product, like an eye mask, requires a lesser degree of customer education than a more complex and expensive serum. Although Image has invested in expanding customer education on social media — the brand grew its social-media team to six people in 2022 — Murray says it’s no coincidence that products requiring a low level of research by customers tend to perform better when it comes to on-platform checkout. “Simplicity is one of our core pillars. On social, I think even more so,” she says. “So a cleanser is going to do well. You know?”

Because Image’s products are only sold direct-to-consumer and at select spas across the country, the brand faces an additional challenge securing customers. “Because we’re not a Sephora, for instance, we have to think extra hard about how we can reach customers in a way that’s relevant to them,” Murray says. “It’s a business-building endeavour to wrap our heads around how to market to Gen-Z, who are the largest consumer generation. But that’s going to provide a lot of lifetime value for both our brand and our spas.” Investing in social commerce, then, is a worthwhile investment.

Partnering with the right influencers

Influencer marketing — a tactic that has increased in popularity as brands have experienced decreased returns from paid social advertising — can also help brands expand their reach on social. Image, as a professional skincare line, almost exclusively taps estheticians for its influencer strategy. By partnering with influencers who can use their professional experience to increase customer education, the brand can more easily push sales on social media. “They have very organic advocacy and can speak authentically about the product,” Murray says. “When you use celebrity influencers, your reach may increase, but the trust and credibility that comes with estheticians is much higher.”

For some brands, though, the opposite approach may work just as well. Mavely, a Chicago-based influencer marketing platform, pairs more than 650 brands, including Gap and Honest Company, with over 25,000 “everyday influencers” who can freely share affiliate links for those companies on their social-media platforms.

That might sound like a recipe for disaster to brands that are used to having close control of their influencer relations strategy, but it’s actually proven hugely beneficial for retailers that have signed on to the platform, says co-founder and CEO Evan Wray. “A lot of brands have had very negative experiences with influencer marketing agencies because they’ll pay $100,000 and get five sales — that puts a bad taste in their mouth,” he says. “My view is that the future of influencer marketing is actually performance-based.”

A peer-to-peer social commerce strategy that taps people with authentic, relatable social media presences, he says, can turn into a massively scaled distribution channel for a brand — even if that brand has no control over the content that these influencers produce. And this form of influencer marketing isn’t just for “Instagrammable” DTC brands, either: Mavely’s top-performing brands are major big box retailers.

Finding your livestream shopping fit

Livestream shopping, a $423 billion market in China, led to $17 billion in sales in the U.S. in 2022, and is expected to triple to a $55 billion market by 2026. It’s a rapidly growing social-commerce strategy — but it’s not one that will work for any brand or product, says Aaron Levant, founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based B2C live shopping platform Ntwrk. “A product has to have a lot of different attributes that can make it interesting enough for livestream shopping,” he says. Basic household commodities — which sell successfully on Chinese livestream platforms like Taobao — likely won’t appeal to U.S. consumers in the same context. Limited edition drops, collectibles, and products that benefit from some kind of live demonstration — like clothing and makeup — are better suited to the medium.

Where a brand decides to host its livestream also matters, Levant says. Although Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok all offer livestream functionalities, he argues that smaller, more niche platforms could lead to better conversion: “I’ve done some experiments on [bigger] platforms, and their conversion rates are around 0.00003 percent. On a platform like Ntwrk, we get 5 percent conversion rates.”