Alice Herman / 4 Mins Read
Updated: February 27, 2023
Social commerce is an advanced, amplifying strategy for e-commerce sites - and it’s only gaining ground. Social commerce is expected to rapidly develop in the coming years as the industry adapts to new technology and social trends.
The attention span of online users is forever reducing. They are drifting more and more towards social media to find solutions to their everyday problems, be it what diet they should follow or which gifts to buy for their partners.
Social Media presents an incredible opportunity for E-commerce businesses to present their products and services as the ultimate solution for their daily life essentials.
When Social Media meets E-Commerce, Social Commerce is born. This article will educate you all about Social Commerce- What is it? What are its benefits?
Let’s get started!
Social Commerce: What Is It?
Social Commerce is all about selling through social media. You simply incorporate social media as an important element of your E-commerce marketing strategy to augment your overall sales and revenues.
Social Commerce has been growing and it’s growing fast. In fact, 60% of Instagram users find new products on the platform. Hence, it makes complete sense to sell them over there.
30% of online shoppers readily make purchases from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, or Snapchat. The smartest option for E-Commerce marketers to utilize this behavioral pattern of online shoppers is to engage users at the point of inspiration and turn their social media engagement into sales for your e-commerce business.
Social Commerce: Why Is It Important?
At its core, Social Commerce is all about easing the overall purchase experience of your users. It helps to prevent confusions leading to the abandonment of the purchase journey.
It reduces the overall complexity of online shopping by removing the practice of redirecting users from one platform to another. It brings the point of inspiration closer to the point of sale.
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Here are some reasons why Social Commerce is so crucial for the growth of your E-Commerce business.
Social Media opens a two-way interaction and engagement between the brand and its customers. Your customers can like, add a review, comment, and share your products and services based on their experience.
This also gets shared in their respective social circles thereby spreading a good word about your brand beyond your target audience. It helps you to connect, and not just sell. Your overall authentic engagement is also enhanced.
Improved engagement also helps in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). More engagement will drive users to the last point of their purchase journey thereby increasing your e-commerce conversion rate.
If you are an authentic brand providing high-quality services, then your social media pages will be flooded with positive reviews posted by happy and satisfied customers. These user-generated reviews are way more trustworthy than any brand content you create for your advertisement purpose.
Your social media followers are likely to trust and buy your products after interacting with these reviews. On the other hand, your loyal customers are likely to recur their purchases. Your loyal customers are your best brand advocates. This helps you to build deeper trust and loyalty.
If you opt for social selling, you prevent your users from the boring task of visiting different webpages, signing in, filling in boring forms, etc. killing their interest and will to complete their purchase journey till its last stepstone.
By bringing the point of sale closer to the point of inspiration, you give your users a frictionless and a long-lasting customer experience that makes them return for another buying session.
Integrating your social channels with your E-Commerce platform is a well tested and tried way to increase your sales and revenues. It also helps to increase the overall average value of each order that users place from your website.
Social media actually compels users to buy more. It is easy, simple, and so much visually appealing. With the help of social commerce and booming smartphone use, shopping is just a few clicks away. This results in customers ending up buying more than they wanted to.
Social Media comes with no geographical boundaries. It helps you to bring forward your business to a global audience. If you wish to target an international audience for your E-Commerce business, there is no other better platform than social media for you.
You can easily target your users with customized and tailor-made advertisement campaigns across multiple social media platforms. Social Commerce gives endless growth opportunities and expanded audience reach is a major one among those opportunities.
More is the engagement that your social commerce business attracts across multiple social platforms, higher is the search engine ranking. Enhanced engagement directly indicates the presence of highly relevant content on your visual commerce platform.
Higher search engine ranking on the Google console simply improves your organic visibility when users search on Google using keywords relating to the types of services and products that you provide. This means more traffic on your visual commerce platform.
Social Media Platforms recognize their importance in driving a business’s growth. Hence, when you integrate social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram as a marketing platform for growing your e-commerce business, you also get access to your business metrics on the platform.
This deeper insight into the performance of your e-commerce business on social media helps you to improve the shortcomings of your marketing campaign. You can also track your competitors' performance and get an idea of their marketing strategy and better your own marketing strategy to ace them out of the competition.
Having discussed the amazing benefits of using Social Commerce for growing and flourishing your visual commerce platform, now it’s time to ponder upon how to grow your social commerce platform.
One amazing way is by embedding Shoppable Social Media Feeds on your website, thereby converting your E-Commerce platform into a Social Commerce Platform. It helps to enhance your overall Conversion Rate Optimization.
These Shoppable Posts are actually embedded social media feeds aggregated from different social media platforms which present social proof for the authenticity of your brand. They present the option of buying that particular product on the embedded social media feed itself.
This way your users can buy the product or book the service at the point of inspiration itself thereby eliminating any opportunity of confusion or abandonment of the purchase journey.
Social Commerce helps to dilute the difference between the big brands and the small budding brands. It provides a level field for every player to prove the authenticity of their E-Commerce business.
So what is still holding you back? Start integrating the social commerce marketing strategies for your e-commerce platform and enhance your overall conversion rate optimization.
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I’m Alice Herman and I’m a digital marketer and technical writer. I’m passionate about exploring and writing about innovation, technology, and digital marketing trends. Learn all about Social Commerce and how can it help you to grow your business.
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