No matter what sort of product you are selling whether its an electronics, home accessories, consumer goods, pharmaceutical products, or any other. The marketplace is competitive and you need to work hard or differently to excel in this field. Sometimes it seems impossible to keep up with this competition in the market. It feels difficult for you to cope with competition and cultural trends that are changing on daily basis. Well, you can choose another way to speed up your sales and helps you to engage with more customers. You might have heard about this technique earlier which is social commerce.
Social Commerce Growth
Social commerce is increasing day by day and there are several $22 billion in sales in 2019 and still, it doesn’t stop there. The average increase of percentage in 2023 is around 85%. This has become an important aspect for online sellers.
Social Commerce
If you are thinking that social commerce is the same just like social media marketing, well it’s a different thing. Social media marketing is all about providing awareness of your brand and engaging customers to expand your brand so that people remember you while purchasing. While social commerce is the conversion of sales within social media platforms.
Social Commerce Platforms
While doing social commerce you don’t need to have a separate platform, you can do it on existing social media platforms or tools. People are already using these platforms while others are moving towards new technologies that provide security against purchasing and selling. Below are the popular social media platforms that you can consider for social commerce.
· TikTok
· Snapchat
These platforms have almost the same features that you cannot find on other sites, as they are specifically designed for social media platforms. They help you to have a better purchasing experience while moving someone from just a marketing message to pursuing them for purchasing items and then comes the final conversion. Below are the unique features of social commerce:
- Buy Buttons are available on your social media platforms, but they are different for several platforms. Even for some platforms, users don’t need to leave and they can purchase directly, just like the swipe-up button on Instagram stories.
- Multiple Tagging is mentioning your products in the form of tags or some brands directly mentioning and supporting other brands using @. This will help users to find your products easily using these tags and mentions of your products. You can post your picture and mention brand names of apparel, jewellery, shoes, and other items with tags.
- Customer Support is live chat support by messenger app, it makes users satisfied as they directly communicate with chat support.
- Shoppable Galleries are the ones where you can add photos that redirect towards sales and it has more powerful commerce capabilities. You can post pictures on Pinterest with direct links to the website. Now even other social media platforms are including this feature in their post.
- Active User Participation includes engaging your active social media users by putting products for sale on the site and then marketing them. People will make purchases while looking for the products they want to buy.
Social Commerce to Increase Ecommerce Conversion
Social media can help you drive traffic to your products, especially from the younger customers that are looking for brands that provide authenticity and transparency in their products. Below are the social e-commerce points that can be fruitful for your brand.
· Build Trust in Customers
While interacting with your customers through the proper platform brings trustworthiness and loyalty to your brand. You are not working individually as a brand you are connected with your consumers with a trustable platform. This helps them to trust you more and have faith in you while buying your products or sharing business with you.
· Drive Engagement
Some people look to buy Instagram followers UK while others look for several techniques to increase engagement. Driving organic traffic for your brand is the best way to gain success. People feel more comfortable collaborating with brands on social media platforms rather than as a faceless brand. People look for genuine engagement to finalize their decision and social media is the best answer for them. It's because they believe in user-generated content as it comes directly from you and is more authentic.
· Seamless and Quick Shopping Experience
Unlike in traditional shopping, you don’t have to wait for hours to do your purchase and pay your bills. What’s more convincing than scrolling through social media platforms and doing shopping at the same time? Going through social media pages and redirected towards sales pages or even sometimes purchasing without leaving your social media platform.
What do You need to do for Social Commerce?
Social commerce is not as easy as it seems to be you have to learn quickly and work on your abilities to drive traffic. Commitment to providing best practices and tactics that work for your e-commerce business is necessary. Below are the best practices that you can apply to social commerce:
- Influencer marketing is the best way to experience better ROI because people trust their influencers rather than brands. Deals and contests provided by influencers from your brand will be beneficial for you.
- Share user-generated content by posting polls and asking questions from your followers, creating content and choosing relevant hashtags will also work great.
- You can use several tools to measure your success, analyze your posts and see what sort of content gets the most engagement. Engage with your followers through comments or direct messages and answer calls to action.
Conclusion
Social commerce is a great tool but it's nothing without a proper e-commerce platform. You cannot have your personal social media platform and not even control the existing platforms by yourself. While taking help from e-commerce platforms will benefit you in the following ways:
- Secure environment
- Reach new customers with SEO
- Provide better customer support
- Collect customer insights
- Integrate a good content marketing strategy
- Complete control of online business
Social commerce allows many more brands to sell their products on platforms where there are already a lot of customers available. The best e-commerce strategy you can apply is to combine these two channels and generate maximum revenue.
