What is Social Ecommerce?

If there’s one thing that’s made connecting with your customers easier for e-commerce brands it’s social media. There are 3.5 billion social media users on the planet, with an average user time of 3 hours per day. 

However, for e-commerce businesses, social media is more than just a tool to promote your products and engage with your audience. When you combine the very best of e-commerce marketing with social media you get a market that is already worth a global value of over $89 billion. What is that market? Social commerce. Let’s take a deeper look into this growing market, as well as how you can use it for your brand. 

What is social e-commerce?

Social e-commerce or social commerce is when your business sells products or services directly on social media. This means that your customer’s shopping experience, from product research to checking out, occurs on a social media platform. In essence, you don’t even need to have an e-commerce store as you can simply use the social network of your choice. 

At present, there are three social media platforms which allow social commerce to take place – Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram. There are many benefits of using social commerce for your business. Let’s look at some of those. 

The benefits of using Social ecommerce for your brand

Social commerce is more than just a feature of a social network – it’s actually a huge opportunity for your brand to make sales. If you’re not quite there yet, here are a few reasons as to why you may want to get onboard with social commerce:

• Get access to a wide audience – Facebook alone has over 2.7 billion monthly active users
• A streamlined buying process, making it easy for your customers to purchase in just a few clicks rather than having to leave a social platform to go to your brand website
• Enhanced customer loyalty – by building deeper relationships on social media with your audience, you have the potential to gain more loyal customers who will continue to purchase from you
• Learn valuable insights into metrics – social media allows you to gain insights into important metrics. You can discover how good your engagement and reach is, as well as conversion stats
• Build deeper trust – having a selling platform on social media enhances trust with your audience. Buyers can sometimes be sceptical of brands with their own website, especially if it doesn’t appear professional. When you’re selling via social media you don’t have to worry about that potential issue

Social ecommerce trends

Social commerce has already established trends for those using this feature. Let’s look at some trends emerging from social ecommerce.

Video rules

You only have to take a look at any social media platform to see that video content is continuously growing in popularity. The average person will watch 100 minutes of online video per day in 2021, while 1 minute of video content is equal to 1.8 million words to your audience.

Whether you use video content for your social media ads or marketing, utilizing the power of video for your brand can help you to gain better results.

Online conversation

Social commerce enables you to directly converse with your audience – something that email cannot do. From getting answers to a query or discovering more about your brand, social media has enabled consumers to open up a conversation with brands. 

Many consumers want instant answers to their questions. After all, if you had to wait hours or days for an answer, wouldn’t you start to look elsewhere? Ecommerce has given consumers more options to choose from, and with the amount of competition online for businesses, it's easy for consumers to take their custom elsewhere should they be disappointed with a brand. 

At this present moment, only chatbots and social media allow brands to directly converse with their audience. 

Built-in social proof

Your customers care about your reputation, especially if they’ve never purchased from you before. It takes more than simply using nice imagery and engaging posts for customers to part with their hard-earned cash. The one thing that can make a difference is social proof. 

Having consumers interacting with your content with shares, comments, and likes, instantly shows your target audience that you’re worth talking about. Incorporating user-generated content alongside building your social media presence helps to increase trust and show that you’re a reliable and honest brand. 

Top tactics to use for social ecommerce

So now you know some of the trends emerging from social ecommerce, what tactics can you use in your marketing strategy to boost your conversions?

Influencer marketing

Did you know that brands make on average over $5 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing? Influencer marketing works because many consumers trust their opinions more than a celebrity or brand spokesperson. 

Even using influencers with relatively smaller audiences can enhance the trustworthiness of your business. Besides, you don’t even need to spend a lot of money on this type of marketing as you can create content with influencers in return for free products or vouchers. 

How do you get started with influencer marketing? This answer is via Insense. Insense is a platform that has worked with over 100 B2C ecommerce brands, helping them to create high performing content to publish on social media. Insense can complement and elevate any marketing strategy by enabling you to search for the very best influencers within your niche. There are already over 35,000 vetted influencers signed up to Insense within sectors, such as beauty, fashion, food, healthy, family, pets, and much more. 

You can easily search for influencers to work with for your marketing campaigns, or you can create a campaign brief and ask influencers to apply to work with you. Additionally, Insense is extremely useful for Shopify integration, allowing you to directly connect your brand shop. 

Whether you wish to pay influencers to create content for your campaigns or work with them in exchange for a product, our simple marketplace makes it easy for you to see influencer stats, including their normal fee, number of social followers, etc. 

Make use of Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger can be used as a chatbot if you implement a tool like ManyChat. This enables you to drive sales via Messenger, as well as conversing with customers. If you don’t already have an automated bot checkout, you can use certain integration to get them up and running. Some tools allow you to run bots via several social media platforms. 

Promote your lower cost products

People browsing social media platforms are more likely to make purchases on the spur of the moment. That means it’s unlikely that they’re going to be spending thousands of dollars on one item. 

The average order value generated via referrals tends to be around $50. Obviously, you can test your products to discover which ones are most likely to sell via social commerce. If you have an ecommerce platform, you can easily integrate them into your Facebook store, buyable Pinterest pins, and Instagram tags, via specific tools. 

Capture email addresses

With social commerce still growing it makes sense to capture email addresses after a customer purchase. Your email list is a valuable asset and you can use it to nurture customers in the following weeks. If you want to increase your conversions, an email list is going to be one of your best assets. 

Create content with influencers and amplify it in paid ads

It’s never too late to start incorporating influencers into your brand marketing strategy. Whether you’re starting to think about social commerce or you’re already implementing it, using influencers for your marketing campaigns can significantly increase your metrics, from boosting conversions to enhancing brand awareness. 

Begin creating content with your ideal influencers today by joining Insense.