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Why Social Commerce Could Eclipse E-Commerce

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By Bradian Muliadi.

Online commerce platforms have changed the process by which we discover and purchase a product. In fact, research has forecasted that e-sales will exceed $735 billion by 2023 as 81% of consumers search for products they need to buy on Instagram and Facebook, making the two channels a massive reference hub for shopping.

However, social commerce is not simply a way for social channels to increase traffic to your traditional sales channels. Instead, it is a new kind of commerce in which the entire shopping experience — from viewing to checkout — takes place in a social media channel. Traditional online store structures, such as websites or applications, are no longer the only way for consumers to shop online as the social media platforms that users love have become accessible storefronts. The surge in social commerce is likely due to the fact it benefits both the consumer and the brand: Social commerce cuts a significant length in a user’s buying journey by allowing them to take action immediately after seeing an advertised product, therefore eliminating the web sign-in process or app downloads, as well as reducing common issues for brands such as abandoned carts.

A Commerce Ecosystem Like Never Before

Since 2019, Instagram has tested in-app checkout. The Facebook-owned company also allows influencers to tag the products they endorse, which enables users to shop for products without even following the brand’s account. These influencers are an important factor in the social commerce industry. As we are expecting a market size of $9.7 billion in 2020 for influencer marketing, the ability to shop directly from an influencers’ post represents a massive opportunity for brands and research has shown that 63% of social media users between the ages of 18 and 34 trust influencers’ recommendations more than they trust brands.

Of course, that’s only a glimpse of how social commerce is charting a revolutionized shopping experience. Social media has an overwhelming amount of information that shows the likes, behaviors and relationships among users. This is increasingly important as users begin to expect personalized and algorithm-customized content. Roland Berger cited that almost three-quarters of users expect advertising content tailored to their preferences.

Social Commerce To Grow In Many Platforms

Instagram is one of the largest social media applications globally and a leader in social commerce as one-third of its users have bought something directly from an Instagram ad. eMarketer predicts that Instagram’s advertising revenue will increase by 47% in 2020, largely due to shoppable ads.

TikTok, dubbed the fastest-growing social app, has 800 million active users monthly. A large portion of its users are under the age of 30, making TikTok a viable channel to reach out to Gen Z, a market with $143 billion in spending power. The app is currently looking to test the social commerce functions that have succeeded in their Chinese-developed twin app, Douyin, such as the ability for users to zoom in on items that appear in a video and shop them directly on the app. Currently, the ability to link a post to a product page is available in most countries where TikTok is available. A “Shop Now” call to action has also been used by brands to turn creators’ content into in-feed ads.

Social commerce features that we have seen up to this point are only the beginning of a new era of shopping. Most social media apps are developing new ways that allow users to shop directly from their platform. Facebook allows cataloging products, managing sales and running ads for businesses big and small all over the globe. Pinterest enables ads with a “buy” call to action to appear in a user’s Pinterest board as well as targeted ads based on personal pins. Snapchat has partnered with Shopify to allow brands like Kylie Cosmetics to provide an in-app checkout option for U.S. users. It won’t end there.

Beyond unifying the fragmented online purchase experience to provide a smoother shopping experience for users, social commerce’s promise also lies in the democratization and empowerment of online sales for small to medium businesses, by providing a platform that enables an end-to-end purchase journey from product discovery to the final transaction. Although this means more competition among brands and platforms, it also means more consumer choice, which is always a good thing for online shoppers.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Bradian Muliadi

Founder & CEO at Analisa.io | Instagram & TikTok Analytics. Read Bradian Muliadi’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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A Complete Guide to Using Social Media for Your Small Business

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By Anders Hjorth

Social media has revolutionized human relations and transformed the way we communicate. It has created a new type of celebrity thanks to the power of personal branding.

And businesses are increasingly realizing how direct person-to-person relations via digital channels can be beneficial to their sales and marketing.

To master this new type of business communication, most companies could use a bit of social media advice and some digital marketing tips. So, we’ve gathered a collection of social media tips for business in this article.

They’re easy to understand, easy to execute, and should prove valuable for any small business social media marketing operation.

8 effective social media tips for your small business:

  • Learn about your audience
  • Choose your primary and secondary social networks
  • Use a mix of hero, hub and help content
  • Repurpose your content
  • Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships
  • Set up social commerce
  • Evolve your content from articles to video to live
  • Plan and automate

8 social media marketing tips for small businesses to try

Whereas social media marketing has become an advanced marketing discipline where experts compete for excellence and for outstanding results, it’s also a playground where any business — big or small — can make a difference for itself.

The following social media marketing tips can be implemented by practically any business. (Take special note of Nos. 4 and 8, which are our favorite social media tips on this list.)

1. Learn about your audience

One of the great benefits of social media is the access to market data it provides. Social media platforms are data-driven platforms designed to tailor advertising to their users. In the process, they provide access to some of that data to businesses.

As a business owner, you’ll get access to the social media metrics you need to steer your business, but you’ll also get insights into your audience that you can use for a social media audit or for defining your target market.

How to put your audience insights into action:

While running your social media activity, you’re constantly learning more about your audience. However, you can gather audience insights for a marketing plan in a more structured way.

  • Define your target: First, define what characterizes your target market. Perhaps you have several segments with different characteristics you can outline.
  • Estimate segment sizes: Go to Facebook audience insights and enter the characteristics for each segment to gather an estimate of the audience size.
  • Learn about their media consumption: Identify which publications your audience reads, what they watch, and who they listen to and follow on the internet by looking up their media preferences with SparkToro.

2. Choose your primary and secondary social networks

There are so many communication opportunities via social media marketing that you can easily spread your efforts too thin. By choosing one primary social network where you concentrate your efforts, you’ll get the biggest return on investment.

Other networks can be part of your small business social media strategy as secondary networks that you utilize in a more opportunistic way.

How to select your primary social network:

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to pick one social media network and stick with it. Here’s one approach.

  • Analyze the options: Analyze the user characteristics of the various social networks via information they share with you. Make a list of candidates for your primary social network.
  • Compare with your target audience: Compare and contrast the characteristics of the users on each platform with the characteristics of your target audience to find the best fit.
  • Evaluate your strengths: You probably have more affinities and more reach with one or more of the social networks on your list. Objectively evaluate your strengths on each platform.
  • Apply weights: Set up a simple spreadsheet where you can score each social network on attractivity, audience fit, and strengths. You can weight each score to account for the most important elements. Then pick your primary network, and mark the others as secondary. Build your social media strategy around this primary social network.

3. Use a mix of hero, hub, and help content

Google has a challenge. Its advertisers were brought up with search marketing but were not necessarily educated on how to use Google’s other great advertising channel: YouTube.

Google therefore created a conceptual framework for working with YouTube. This framework helps define the role of video content, which by nature is more expensive to produce and distribute.

Whether you plan to use video or not, the YouTube strategy playbook — which uses the three Hs of “hero,” “hub,” and “help” — can be of great use when planning social media activity for your business.

How to establish your content mix:

Creating a mix of content with the three Hs is very focused on the hero content, or the driving elements of your business’s storyline that you want your broadest audience to see. Let’s look at what you need to do to establish your content mix with this in mind.

  • Content audit: The first thing you need is an overview of your existing content and events that can be used in your content strategy.
  • Brainstorm: The fun part of the process is the brainstorming and idea-testing for your hero content. Aim to find a unique and remarkable content idea that resonates strongly with your audience and emphasizes your brand’s differentiation.
  • Plan around the hero content: Some of the other content you use in your social media strategy can be built around the hero content. Other content pieces act as “hubs” and will simply help your brand stay top of mind. And “help” content is more traditional company information that you place around and between the more story-driven hero content.
  • Build a content calendar: The three types of content come together in a social media content calendar, which helps you stay organized and share your content in a consistent and effective way.

4. Repurpose your content

If you’ve followed our second tip, you may be wondering how to best utilize your secondary social networks. You may also be overwhelmed by the thought of needing to publish content to your social networks multiple times a week.

This is why content repurposing is an important strategy. A publication has a limited life span on social media, and in order to generate a return on your investment in a piece of content, you need to maximize its usage.

How to thoughtfully and effectively repurpose your content:

The initial version of your content should be optimized for your primary social network. Subsequent versions can be formatted to suit other networks, perhaps using a more visual angle, a different perspective, or simply different text.

  • Optimize for your primary network: The first time you publish a piece of content, it should be optimized for your primary social network. Each social network has its own ideal mix of image, video, text, emojis, and hashtags.
  • Adapt to secondary networks: You will likely need to make changes to the format of your content when publishing it on your secondary social networks. Perhaps you’ll only use parts of the content you prepared for your primary network.
  • Republication: One piece of content can typically be presented several times to your primary audience. This is useful as you never reach 100% of your followers with one post since everyone is online at different times. Using different text and images for subsequent publications is a good way to make sure your content doesn’t appear stale or repetitive.
  • Repurposing: Content in which you have invested significant time or money can be repurposed at a later stage. Perhaps you can update a survey you ran, provide a new editorial angle, or redo the graphics. A good way to organize the use and reuse of content is to build a social media content calendar.

5. Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships

Inbound marketing is an approach by which you create and publish content that will drive interested users closer to your offering.

It’s a structured process using planning, scoring, and automation to manage long customer interaction processes. It’s a great approach to marketing for small business, especially in the B2B space.

How to put inbound marketing into action:

Inbound marketing is about using content to drive users to your offering without reaching out to them with advertising.

  • Analyze the user journey: Users travel through various stages before they become prospects for your offering. You first need to identify what questions the user is asking before they’re ready to move to the next step in the user journey.
  • Create and publish content: With the stages of the user journey in mind, create content that corresponds to each stage, and think of mechanisms that will bring the user to the next stage: Newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, webinar registration, etc. This is the stage where you’ll actually use social media platforms to publish your content and engage with your audience.
  • Automate the funnel: One of the aims of inbound marketing is to create an automated lead generation process. It uses content and publications on social media to generate interest and subsequently works like a content relationship management tool. You’ll need a technical solution such as HubSpot or Salesforce Pardot to pursue this approach seriously.

6. Set up social commerce

Users can be strongly influenced by social media but may not be used to buying products there. There is, however, a rising trend of social commerce on social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.

Facebook also recently launched its Page shops, adding e-commerce functionality to business pages on its platform.

How to use social commerce in your social media strategy:

Social commerce is a shortcut from social media to e-commerce. It can be an interesting opportunity for companies with strong social media activity and the possibility to sell online.

  • Prepare product information: In order to sell online via social media, you need the same information as for any other e-commerce activity: product titles and descriptions, images, prices, and an order fulfillment solution.
  • Choose your platform: If your primary social network has e-commerce functionality, go with that platform. If it doesn’t, consider trying one of the leading social commerce platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook.
  • Build the e-commerce functionality: It’s fairly easy to set up social commerce. Products and prices can be entered individually or as a product feed so your shop is up to date.

7. Evolve your content from articles to video to live

When you first consider content for your social media marketing plan, you might think about articles and images.

But video content has become accessible to small businesses now that platforms like the Facebook Live Producer empower you to create professional-looking live video content. You might even want to make video your hero content, as we saw in tip No. 3.

How to make smart use of video:

All you need is a smartphone with a good camera to start producing live video. We also recommend adding a good-quality microphone or headset.

  • Plan your video content: For video content, you need to create a title, write a script, and find the right filming location with good lighting and an appropriate background.
  • Test-run your video: To overcome the fear of looking silly and get used to speaking to the camera, do at least one test run. A teleprompter software tool can be helpful as well.
  • Set it up as an event: You can create video content for later publication or create a live event. Whichever you choose, make sure to build awareness before publication to drive more views and more engagement.

8. Plan and automate

Running social media activities is about efficiently using resources. The best way to organize any social media activity is to plan ahead and automate as much as possible.

There are a number of simple social tools to help with automation that each perform specific tasks, or it can be done using a more complete social media software suite that covers all of your automation needs.

How to plan and automate your social media activity:

If you’ve built your content mix using tip No. 4, you may have started using a content calendar as the nervous system of your social media strategy. Now, all you need to do is connect your primary and secondary social networks to your content via automation.

  • Define your primary social network: As described in the first tip, you should first define your social network set-up and decide where primary content goes.
  • Build your content calendar: A content calendar is a key component of a social media strategy. Build your calendar by placing the hero content first and scheduling supporting content around it. You will likely have a regular flow of hub content, and the amount of help content you produce will depend on your business activity and commercial calendar.
  • Automate publication: Bring it all together with automation software that allows you to connect your content to your social media accounts. Schedule posts to each of your social networks in advance, keeping your content calendar moving like a well-oiled machine.

The best social media tools for small business

Social media automation tools will help your business automate the implementation of your content strategy. In the tips above, we’ve mentioned various tasks for which these tools are useful: in implementing a content calendar, automating publications, and planning ahead.

Let’s look at a few tools that work in different ways.

1. Later

The core functionality of Later is to build a visual content calendar and schedule image posts to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Later’s visual overview of the calendar is one of the best we’ve seen.

Screenshot of Later Calendar View

The content calendar view of Later is visual and well adapted to planning Instagram posts.

2. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is great for getting the most out of your content. It’s the content repurposing, recycling, and automation champion.

MeetEdgar's automatic post creation tool.

A unique feature of MeetEdgar is the automatic creation of post variations submitted for approval.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one the best and most complete social media management tools covering the entire spectrum of automation, management, research, and reporting functionalities for your social media activity.

Sprout Social's reporting options

Sprout Social provides a wide variety of reporting options, including content performance across the social media channels you are using.

Learn from what you do and focus on where you win

Most social media activity only pays off in the medium to long run, which can be frustrating to businesses looking for quick wins or a rapid return on their investment.

But some of the above tips are sure to generate value for your business even in the short run as they can help you focus on what’s essential and what tasks are the best use of your time.

Focus your efforts, optimize your content output, plan ahead, and automate where you can in order to get the most out of your small business’s social media strategy.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

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Social Commerce 2020: What’s Changed?

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Sourced from  Power Retail

Social media can make or break a brand’s image. Small things like maintaining transparent language can be the crux to building a strong and loyal customer.

On average, Australians spend more than 800 minutes scrolling through social media per week. From Instagram to TikTok, we’re living in a world of omnipresence. Shopping is the same, and this omnipresence will only become more ubiquitous.

Every year social commerce adapts and transforms with ever-sophisticated technology and consumers. Digitally native and rapidly self-educating, Australian consumers are spending more tie on their phones than ever before. Capturing every facet of this tech is a vital tool for bolstering growth.

In 2020, it’s not acceptable to simply have an Instagram account. In 2019, the number of internet users globally was 4.4 billion. Furthermore, 3.5 billion of those internet users also utilised social media.

On social media, even the smallest moments can be worthy of a share. Get your team to create a video of someone using a product, share customer images and reviews, and keep the content honest. In this day and age, 59 percent of social media users want to see content that is authentic and engaging. Thirty-three percent wish to see informative content and 28 percent want to see something visually appealing.

2020 Trends to Watch and Apply

  1. Transparency … To the Next Level

    As one of the key buzzwords of the last two years, a retailer that maintains transparency is one that establishes greater trust with its consumer. Whether it’s a simple post on Instagram and Facebook that an item is out of stock, or even posting a requested item on social with a hyperlink to the site. Last week, Sportsgirl shared a post on Instagram with the caption: ‘WE GET IT – YOU ALL CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS DRESS. So, here it is…’ This language is laidback, relatable to its audience and has a compelling CTA which will resonate with its consumer.

    In 2018, Showpo shared a video on YouTube addressing the backlog of orders during the busy Easter period. The video, titled ‘So… We F*cked Up’, included Showpo’s CEO, Jane Lu, who addressed the business’ mistakes and promised to do better in the future. In the act of frankness, it opened up a dialogue about the ways the company could improve. Social media allows companies to have somewhat face-to-face communication with their consumers.

  2. Multiple Platforms – Within Reason

    It’s no longer acceptable to be across two or three channels. Cross-promotion is a fantastic way to keep your consumer abreast of the latest promotions, products and updates for your brand. It’s also a useful tool for capturing a new audience. With TikTok growing exponentially (500 million global active monthly users and 1.5 billion iOs and Android downloads), creating an authentic and well-conceived action plan for these platforms is essential. There is a catch, though. Just because a platform is trending, it doesn’t mean your brand is aligned with that platform.

    A success story of a retailer utilising the likes of TikTok includes Superdry, who brought out three TokTok influencers during the launch of its store in August 2019. “The way Australian’s (and the world for that matter) shop and interact is evolving. We have seen the rise of many businesses and technologies that have entered the traditional brick and mortar marketing stratagem (AfterPay, WeChatPay, Facebook, Instagram and even AI technology) and TikTok is just one of the newer developments,” said Matthew Iozzi, PR and Marketing Manager at Superdry Australia. “We are seeing an active shift in the kind of content brands are expected to create for Gen Z. Moving away from static, posed, model-esque Instagram shots, to engaging video and interactive AI.”

  3. Visual-Rich Content

    It’s no longer viable to share simple images across social media. Content can conjure up a better online retail experience and can create a lifestyle from a single product without too much imagination from the consumer.  YouTube is the best option for tech demonstrations – Instagram is ideal for fashion and makeup. “Using tactics like blogging, you can create warm traffic to remarket to later, with a much lower CAC than cold traffic,” said Cassandra Campbell, Content Marketing Lead at Shopify.

    It’s not just about creating a beautiful image for Instagram 0- you have to compel your customers to continue to visit your site. Use reviews, essential features of the product, real-life pictures of people using your product and anything else that you think it’s useful for the customer. This is one of the most essential parts of creating rich content – make sure it’s relevant to your customer, not just your brand image. BCF does this in spades with its content. The company often shares imagery of consumers using fishing tackle and camping gear from the retailer, while staying rich in its aesthetics and staying ‘on-brand’.

  4. Don’t Discredit Influencers

    In 2019, there was a peak of influencer content. The social media world was flooded with #ad hashtags, and content was soon becoming far too saturated to have any cut-through. Then when Instagram cut off the visuals cues of likes in 2019, it seemed that the inevitable bubble for influencers had burst. However, this isn’t the case. While the number of influencers may have dipped in size, it means that the quality of this content may have actually increased. According to Power Retail, 53 percent of Australian consumers want influencers to promote bargains, and 43 percent prefer content that is filled with advice or tips.

    When it comes to finding the right influencers for your content, it’s not about finding someone with a considerable following. In reality, that will get you nowhere. It’ doesn’t make sense to pay someone thousands if they don’t represent the retailer’s brand image, messaging or overall ethos. Micro-influencers, or those with under 100,000 followers, often have a core community of loyal followers who produce a high engagement rate. While hiring a celebrity may look great for your image, it may not have the cut-though you’re expecting. Influencers of this calibre get hundreds of offers thrown at their feet every day, and if they shill every product under the sun, their audience may feel desensitised to the content.

Really, not much has changed for social commerce, but the retailers must remember the power of social media. It pays to do your research, find imagery and messaging that resonates with your brand, and don’t be afraid to reach out into new platforms that may bolster further growth with a new audience.  It can make or break a brand; and can build or demolish reputation.

Sourced from Power Retail

 

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Boomers Aren’t as Influenced by Social Commerce as Younger Cohorts

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Sourced from eMarketer

Social media has become a hub of influence on many consumers’ shopping. Boomers, though, have been wary of this, whether via ads, postings by fellow consumers or the cajolery of “influencers.”

According to February 2019 polling by Oracle, social media ads inspire little credence from boomers. Fewer than one in 10 internet users ages 55 to 75 said they trust social ads for recommendations when shopping.

US Internet Users Who Trust Social Media Ads for Recommendations When Shopping, by Demographic, Feb 2019 (% of respondents in each group)

“It’s not just an aversion to straight-out advertising. Influencers are conspicuously uninfluential, too,” said Mark Dolliver, principal analyst at eMarketer and author of our latest report, “US Boomers 2019: ‘Aging in Place’ in Multiple Aspects of Life.”

In Oracle’s polling, 96% of boomers (along with 90% of Xers and 79% of millennials) agreed that they “distrust influencers and bloggers.” Meanwhile, ThinkNow Research’s April 2019 survey found a mere 9% of 55- to 64-year-olds (vs. about four in 10 millennials) saying they heed what social media influencers recommend.

US Adults Who Pay Attention to Recommendations from Influencers, April 2019 (% of internet users, by demographic)

Boomers are also less likely than younger consumers to report being influenced by other peoples’ opinions online. In Oracle’s survey, 14% of boomers—vs. 22% of Xers and 28% of millennials—said they trust the recommendations of “fellow consumers online.” Similarly, a Charles Schwab survey in February 2019 found boomers about one-third as likely as millennials (16% vs. 49%) to say they are “likely to spend on experiences because of something they saw on social media.”

According to Joe Beier, executive vice president of GfK, there’s an important distinction between boomer attitudes toward “expert reviews”—those given by authoritative sources with credentials in a subject area—and reviews by everyday users. Boomers are less likely than younger people to find value in the latter. “What does Bill next door know that’s really going to enlighten me?” as Beier put it. But they do pay attention to the expert reviews. “Boomers have much more of an old-school view, ‘Ok, the experts are the ones that know what’s going on. And therefore they’re the ones I’m going to trust and look to help inform my decision.’ … If it’s just more of an anonymous pool of user reviews, there’s a certain skepticism about that,” he said.

While marketers view social media as a venue where they can bond with consumers, many boomers regard it as a place where companies invade their privacy. In March-April 2019 polling by CivicScience for the Internet Innovation Alliance, 79% of respondents 55 and older disagreed (62% “strongly”) with the statement, “I’m OK with online tech/social media companies that collect and use my personal data because it makes my online searches, advertisements and content more relevant to me.”

Few boomers are eager about social commerce. In the eMarketer/Bizrate Insights polling, about half of 55- to 65-year-olds said either that they haven’t made purchases via social and are uninterested in doing so (49%) or don’t know what that is (3%). Just 7% reported using it regularly.

Sourced from eMarketer

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Why The Rise Of Social Commerce Is Inevitable

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By Jia Wertz

The line between social media and e-commerce is increasingly becoming blurred, commonly known as social commerce. The sheer amount of time spent by people, especially younger generations, on social media apps has positioned social commerce as the indisputable market breakout trend for e-commerce in the coming years. Generation Z spends 2-3 times more shopping on social channels than the average consumer, with Instagram and Snapchat taking the lead, while Generation X prefers shopping on Facebook. 

Hubspot defines omni-channel commerce as “the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business.”

Their definition highlights the mounting pressure on brands to streamline their marketing models across devices and applications. With Generation Z connected online near-constantly, mainly on social channels, and on track to become the largest consumer generation on the planet, the importance of social commerce is obvious for forward-thinking e-commerce brands.

Video Content, Social Apps, And Evolving Technology

One of the primary drivers of the success of social commerce has been the shift of preference by Generation Z and Millennials away from Facebook and towards platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. The key is short-form video content, which is rapidly becoming the dominant form of online content.

For example, 91% of consumers prefer interactive or visual content, such as video, over conventional static media, and internet video traffic is expected to have a compound annual growth rate increase of 33% from 2017 to 2022. This trend is complemented by new technology that underpins mobile applications and video streaming, from progressive web applications (PWA) to the pending materialization of 5G.  

“One of the most overlooked aspects of digital marketing campaigns, especially with smaller businesses, is that YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google,” says George Konidis, an SEO expert and Founder of Growing Search. 

“It’s hard to achieve digital growth among younger consumers when you ignore video content. We are seeing an enormous boost in video content consumption, and the transition to hybrid social apps, like PWAs, will only accelerate this trend,” he says.   

PWAs are a form of hybrid e-commerce website and mobile application. They arose out of the market need for faster and deeper integrations of e-commerce functionality into mobile apps – particularly social media. They load faster than mobile sites, and brands like West Elm and Lancome are some of the technology’s early adopters. 

For younger users that grew up on the internet and are impatient when it comes to loading times and buffering, PWAs represent a marked opportunity for brands to capitalize on social commerce. For example, when Lancôme converted its mobile site to a PWA, conversions went up 17% and mobile sessions increased 51%. 

Depop, who just closed $63 million in funding as a social fashion app targeting Millennials and Generation Z, is an excellent example of the convergence of social commerce and technology. Similarly, the popularity of “merch-drops” and exclusive branding on new social media channels like Monkey and TikTok are gaining steam.

And marketers are taking notice.

For example, Sprout Social cited prudent evaluation of emerging social media channels as an important marketing tactic for online brands. 

Instagram and Snapchat are both working on built-in e-commerce projects, hoping to keep pace with upstart social commerce apps.

“Online shoppers do 12 searches on average before engaging on a specific brand’s website. Social commerce can connect social media users directly to brands with a simple click; it’s a powerful way to onboard more consumers and reduce the average number of searches,” says Konidis. “Small online businesses have never had the opportunity to bring in more consumers and experience outsized growth.” 

Young People Shape Consumer Markets

Quite simply, young people determine what is trending culturally, and consequently, what drives demand in consumer markets. The combination of Generation Z and Millennials, who have very similar social and political tastes – not just commercial – represent a paradigm shift in digital commerce.

What once consisted of static online brand websites is becoming a much more fluid ecosystem defined by multiple threads of content mediums.

The rise of social commerce is poised to coincide with some significant technological boosts, and even perhaps threaten the dominance of social media giants like Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has even gone as far as to discreetly develop a proprietary cryptocurrency, seeking to enter the payments market for what seems like an eventual integration of e-commerce features too.

What’s clear is that social commerce is inevitable, driven by the changing cultural and consumer preferences of younger generations.

Feature Image Credit: Pixabay

By Jia Wertz

I am the CEO of Studio 15, a socially responsible fashion brand. After leaving behind a 15-year career in the corporate fashion world, I started a company that focuses on doing good and supporting women. It’s Studio 15’s mission to promote and collaborate with other female-owned businesses and to support female entrepreneurs in developing countries through a partnership with Kleos MFG, a non-profit organization.

Sourced from Forbes

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Will social commerce ever replace e-commerce?

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With native transactions happening on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other platforms, how can e-commerce sites step up and avoid the threat from social commerce?

Salesforce study suggests limited social media impact on ecommerce

E-commerce sites are under threat from the rising tide of social commerce transactions. Seamless purchases from Pinterest’s 60 million buyable pins and Instagram’s frictionless sales directly from within the app make it more difficult for e-commerce sites to compete effectively.

Over 550 million people use Facebook’s Marketplace, enabling seamless transactions on the platform — and e-commerce is starting to struggle against the rising tide.

Menlo Park, CA-based online video editing company Magisto, surveyed over 750 decision makers in the US throughout May 2018. It wanted to highlight the difficulties e-commerce sites are facing with the rising trend of social commerce transactions.

Although three out of four (75 percent) of respondents manage at least one third-party e-commerce profile, they are being used in a passive way. Instead of cultivating good customer relationships, these passive transactions are satisfying customer demand only.

Already sales through social media is rising. Only 26 percent of respondents say they use third-party e-commerce platforms to market their business, compared to 71 percent who use social media.

Almost three out of four (72 percent) of marketers say they would be more likely to use third-party e-commerce sites if they offered more tools to actively market or promote their business, or if they could natively create, upload, and edit content on the platform.

It discovered that the gap between social and e-commerce sales will narrow dramatically in 2018. Almost half of marketers surveyed said that they would use social media for all of their business and marketing transactions if social media platforms offered direct sales.

Almost half (48 percent) of marketers say that if social media platforms offered direct sales, they would be more likely to use social media for all of their business and marketing transactions.

A similar amount (49 percent) said that they would be more likely to use an e-commerce site if they offered video creation as a marketing tool.

Businesses want to become a one-stop-shop, combining social media with e-commerce sales. The challenge is that targeting audiences is hard on third-party e-commerce sites.

The challenge for e-commerce sites is to become frictionless, and take the customer through a simple journey to sales, maintaining, and growing the relationship with the customer, putting them at the heart of the relationship.

Social media used to be disconnected from direct sales, but that has changed really quickly. E-commerce sites need to up their game in order to keep up — or be left behind in the social commerce race

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Sourced from ZDNet

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