This is the generation of social media. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is using one or the other social media platforms. Instagram, being one of the most popular social media platforms has over 90% of followers for alone business accounts. 60% of Instagram users acknowledge that they find new products from Instagram. Another prominent social media platform, Facebook has over 1.47 billion active users per day. More than 93% of online shoppers state that online social media reviews have a great impact on their buying decisions. 30% of online shoppers agree that they are readily purchasing goods from social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.  These facts cannot be ignored, especially by ecommerce businesses. When social media meets ecommerce, it can be named as social commerce. It is a smart way to engage users’ right where they are, to eventually lead them to sales. In this article, we will be discussing how social shopping work; but, before that let’s know more about Social Shopping!

What is Social Shopping?

Social Shopping can be termed as the junction between Social Media and Ecommerce. With social media platforms maturing significantly, it has become one of the prime steps in a customers’ online shopping journey. For ecommerce retailers, social media has become a powerful tool to build brand awareness, connect and interact with customers, and nourish their relationship with the customers. As mentioned above, social shopping can also be termed as social commerce. To frame it, social commerce/ social shopping can be defined as:

The use of social media platforms to provide a targeted and personalized in-app shopping experience for online customers.

In simple words, it is the integration of ecommerce sales into social media platforms. Social Commerce is inclusive of shoppable advertisements and posts which are not similar to the regular posts you browse through. Shoppable ads and posts are integrated with ‘Buy buttons’ ‘Call to Actions (CTA)’, ‘Plugins’, etc. At present, social commerce is available on two of the most prominent social media platforms, Facebook, and Instagram. However, social commerce is a continuously evolving sector and you will experience newer changes shortly. For instance, in Instagram, you might have come across stories from various businesses with the ‘Swipe Up’ option wherein if the ad in the story intrigued you, swipe up and you’ll be on the seller’s website without needing to leave your Instagram account. You can directly purchase from the website, close the window and land back to right where you left on Instagram.

How Does Social Shopping Work?

The social shopping experience is unique with different social media platforms. Below are the descriptions of how each platform works for social shopping:

Facebook

Facebook lets you sell products or services on its platform, easily. You can start an attractive business page on Facebook using images, videos, graphics, and text. The most popular social media platform also presented a ‘Shop-Now’ CTA button in order to let the customers check out the products or services, right away. Moreover, there are other tools that ecommerce businesses can opt for such as the dynamic banner ads. The dynamic banner ads can automatically accustom ad content and campaigns to the target audience. Facebook has above 2.4 billion monthly active users from around the world, making these marketing tools more effective. You can also term selling on Facebook as f-commerce.

In order to sell on Facebook, you must create a ‘Shop Now’ store by:

1. Meeting the eligibility criteria for selling on Facebook.
2. Adding unlimited sellable physical products.
3. Customizing your product inventory.
4. Interacting with online shoppers.
5. Getting insights into Facebook Shopping.
6. Agreeing to the Merchants Terms and Conditions.

Selling on Facebook will let you:

1. Upload sellable products with product descriptions.
2. Customize your product catalogue.
3. Create shoppable ads.
4. Manage your orders.
5. Sell directly from your Facebook business page.

Facebook Messenger facilitates the communication of retailers and customers. With a personalized interaction using Facebook Messenger, you can establish a feeling of trust with your customers, solve the problems faced by the customers, and imparts a need for urgency to the customers. However, since social commerce is still a developing area, you might need to smartly select the products to be sold and check what works for your ecommerce business, the best.

Instagram

Instagram has over 1 billion registered users from around the globe. The social media platform that was initially built with photos and short videos is now extensively used as a medium to feature storytelling through its ‘Instagram Story’ feature, launched back in August 2016. Like Facebook, Instagram also provides a few social selling tools such as story ads, video ads, shopping ads, and swipeable carousel ads. Moreover, Instagram is quite popular for influencer marketing wherein businesses use influential leaders to spread your business message to a larger audience. Influencer marketing works parallel to social media marketing and content marketing. The target audience for influencer marketing, irrespective of the business niche is the young generation using Instagram aged between 18 and 24 years. As per researches, Instagram helps in driving about 10.7% of social media referrals to the ecommerce sites. Another research stated that Instagram shoppable ads helped them boost their online traffic by 1416%.

The Instagram shopping feature lets you click on the images and videos that feature the sellable product by various ecommerce brands. Instagram lets the users see the name and the price of the product and also visit the seller’s website by hovering over any shoppable post. Usually, the Instagram shoppable posts redirect the shopper to the website of the seller in order to complete the purchase of the product. However, some ecommerce businesses offer the facility to checkout from purchasing any product within the Instagram platform. Here is the problem; with the feature of the in-app checkout procedure, creating the list of retargeting audience based on the visitors of the ecommerce website will be a pain. Ecommerce businesses would not be able to record the conversions and hence would not be able to map their buying patterns.

For selling on Instagram you need to:

1. Check whether you meet their eligibility criteria
2. Connect your Instagram business profile to your Facebook product catalogue using Catalogue Manager or Facebook Partner.
3. Once connected, you need to sign up for Instagram Shopping.
4. Create your shoppable posts and take a look at your shopping insights.

Selling on Instagram will let you:

1. Provide powerful visuals.
2. Get advanced targeting options.
3. Track Instagram ads with the Ads Manager Platform similar to Facebook.
4. Differentiate the business accounts from general Instagram accounts.
5. Reach the undiscovered potential customers.
6. Establish a brand identity and trustworthiness.

What are the key aspects to sell on social media platforms?

In order to build a brand image on social media platforms successfully, you shall need a strategic plan. It will help you create a loyal customer base who regularly visits your business page as well as website and click on the CTA you have provided. Below are some of the key aspects of selling on any social media platform:

1. Content must be relevant to your target audience: You must consider providing your customers with relevant and interesting content to grab their attention. While focusing on the visual content, you must also pay attention to the quality of the written content. To grab the time of your social media target audience, you must provide the content which they are already looking for.
2. Interact with the customers socially: Studies have shown that online shoppers are more likely to purchase products from a retailer when they get customer service via social media platforms. Moreover, people will more quickly open messages from social media platforms than marketing emails. However, you should be sure that you do not use these channels solely for customer acquisition; but, primarily use it to enrich your customers’ purchase as well as post-purchase experience.
3. Make the utmost use of user-generated content: Selling on social media platforms offers an intelligible benefit of not needing to have a constant face-to-face interaction. There are innumerable ways to list your products on social media platforms without sending a direct sales pitch. If you highlight user-generated content and try partnering with valuable influencers to motivate your customers to purchase from your brand without hardcore selling pitch. Moreover, it will let your customers get a real-time view of the products you sell to gain trust in your brand.

Conclusion

Social Shopping or Social Commerce is a natural and sluggish evolution of online shopping. We live in a world where people are spending the majority of their time on the small device in their pockets. And, on that device, the frequent clicks are on the social media platforms. The evolution in technology is making everything smaller and cheaper to connect more and more people from around the globe. With Social Media becoming an integral part of humans’ day-to-day life, businesses must match the pace to reach their target audience. Have you not started social selling yet? Hurry up, your competitors are already out there!