Social Commerce
People like to socialise. They like to organise events, build up hype around their own lives, share pictures and information with friends and generally keep up with one another. By building all of these experiences into a digital space, Mark Zuckerberg and others have revolutionised the web and the way humans interact with one another. With so many forms of entertainment and things to do online, people are spending more and more of their time there. The more time they spend online, the more time they spend on social networks, the more they share and the faster and wider news spreads. What does all of this mean for brands? Well it's nothing short of the Holy Grail of marketing is it not? By embedding social plugins to their websites, companies can spread brand awareness exponentially. By including review and commenting sections on their product pages, companies are demonstrating that they care about their customers' concerns and value their opinions. Moreover, because consumers trust each other more than they do brands, if reviews are positive, companies have the opportunity to sell a lot of products without having done any of the marketing themselves. Essentially, social media is word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.
E-tailers around the world are taking advantage of the influence of social platforms and have taken their e-commerce business platforms one step further by building them right into leading social networking platform, Facebook. F-commerce is about to be the biggest thing in e-commerce. But those e-tailers taking this step would be well advised to amend their offering and shopping experience to fit the platform and its audience. Facebook has so many unique characteristics that would highten the social shopping experience and e-tailers would be silly not to take advantage of them. For instance, brands can write engaging posts on their wall, they can offer one-time promo codes, exclusive deals, perks for commenting and reviewing their products and recommending them to their friends.
Because everything that a user does on Facebook appears in their homefeed (as well as the feeds of their friends), news travels fast. That means more interest, clicks and potential sales for f-commerce brands. Furthermore, the customer interests brands have insight to via Facebook is already adding tons of value to their company and product offerings.
The future of social commerce looks very bright at this point. We've already seen how innovative brands can be with their digital marketing campaigns and it will be interesting to see what they do with social commerce.
About the Author
Adaptive Consultancy is a London-based digital agency specialising in web development, design, ecommerce and internet marketing. Services include search engine optimisation, paid search, email and social media marketing. For more on ecommerce platform visit http://www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/e-commerce/
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