Social Commerce | Improve your media ROI

Social Commerce refers to the use of social media platforms to facilitate the buying and selling of goods and services. This can include things like using Instagram to showcase products and make them available for purchase, or using social media influencers to promote products to their followers. Social commerce often involves the integration of e-commerce functionality into social media platforms, allowing users to make purchases directly within the app or website.

Social Commerce will account for 17% of the total eCommerce sales by 2025

1. Turn your media shoppable: Effectively shorten the path to purchase. Take consumers from your ad to the online store with a full cart.
2. Sales Attribution: Understand consumers' preferences of where to shop & what to shop while having clear visibility on eCommerce sales driven by your media.
3. Improved targeting/retargeting: Social media platforms often collect detailed data on users, which can help businesses target their advertising and marketing to specific demographics.
4. Increased conversions: Shoppable media makes it easy for users to purchase products directly from the media they are viewing, which can lead to higher conversion rates.
5. Increased brand awareness: Shoppable media not only improves conversions but also allows businesses to create more engaging and interactive content that can increase brand awareness.

65% of global internet users have made a purchase through social media in 2022.

Shoppable media improve ROI by providing a direct and efficient way for businesses to sell their products through interactive visual media. By adding tags, links, and buttons to visual media such as images and videos, businesses can make it easy for customers to purchase products directly from the media they are viewing, increasing the chances of a sale.

Unfortunately, the ROI on social media content can be frustratingly hard to quantify. While brands can measure engagement relatively easily on these platforms, conversions are much more difficult to calculate.

Even if brads achieved excellent social media engagement, it may still struggle to:

• Get followers to visit its eCommerce site
• Convert followers into buying customers
• Make content shoppable so that it’s not only driving engagement but generating conversion and sales uplift
• Measure the performance of social content beyond engagement to understand how lucrative each partnership and content asset is
• Scale social content across eCommerce journeys, as it is expensive (in both time and money) to do this manually
• Show the most relevant earned and owned social content to each shopper along their buying journey

An issue at the heart of these challenges could be the brand’s failure to properly invest in social commerce. If the buyer’s journey isn’t smartly managed and analyzed from start to finish, customers might not remain engaged, and conversion rates could fall.

One of the biggest drop-off points for potential customers is the jump between social media and the eCommerce site. Many brands link to static product pages, which often don’t reflect the highly personalized social media feed the customer was just interacting with. This breaks the flow of precious social proof that brands spend so much money investing in.

€1.2 Trillion estimated global sales through social commerce by 2025

Social commerce examples

By definition, social commerce allows a full shopping experience to happen through a social media platform, but social commerce strategies come in a few different forms.?

• Shoppable posts:?Shoppable posts?allow followers to browse and shop directly from your social posts across a variety of social channels, including Instagram reels, Instagram stories, TikTok videos, Pinterest pins, and Facebook photos. By simply tagging one or more products in your images or videos, you can showcase your products natively on social channels and give users a way to buy them.

• Shoppable ads: Shoppable ads are similar to shoppable posts, but they’re catered to a specific audience and are usually part of a paid social campaign. Shoppable ads can be targeted at certain consumers who may be potential customers, or they can act as a reminder of products that a shopper viewed but didn’t buy.?

• Social Storefronts: Some social apps allow a business to create a storefront or a shop to enhance shopping on their social profiles. This shop is essentially an eCommerce store within the social platform that showcases your products. Shops can help a business curate the shopping experience and drive product discovery, and shoppers can explore products and make purchases.

• Influencer content: Working with a social media influencer or?micro-influencer?can help advertise your products, raise brand awareness, and drive users to your profile or shop. Influencers tag your products in their posts, and if a shopper is interested in the product, the tag will take them directly to your product page on that social platform to make a purchase.?

• Live shopping:?Livestream shopping?can help add an even more personalized touch to a social commerce strategy. Through livestream selling, brands and businesses can use livestream video to interact in real time with customers, to demonstrate and talk about their products, and to answer customer questions. Shoppers can buy products from the livestream through shoppable posts or payment links.

• In-app messaging: Interacting with customers on social media platforms through direct messages (DMs) gives space for customers to ask questions and get product help. In-app messaging is also a useful tool to help customers discover products or to provide payment links for a quick checkout.?