When Social Met eCommerce: An Introduction Social Commerce

When Social Met eCommerce:An Introduction to Social Commerce

An Ambassador eBook

Contents

Introduction: More Than a Feeling .......................................3

Chapter 1: The Three Dimensions of Social Comerce ....7

Chapter 2: Selling on Social Networks .............................. 9

Chapter 3: Getting Started with Social Commerce ........ 18

Chapter 4: Analytics and You ..............................................21

Conclusion ..............................................................................24

An Introduction toSocial Commerce

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Table of Contents

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IntroductionAn Introduction toSocial Commerce

Introduction

Introduction: More Than a FeelingSocial media and eCommerce first met in the early 2007 when Facebook began offering virtual gifts to its users. Searching for a new way to conduct business online, the two platforms bumped into each other time and time again, but weren’t able to connect on an intimate level. Finally, a close friendship began to bloom between them and they both embraced a casual relationship. But fate had other plans in store for the two star-crossed online

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platforms, resulting in a storybook marriage and the birth of social commerce.

That’s all well and good, but what exactly is social commerce? Wikipedia defines it as, “a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.”

Put simply, social commerce combines the interactivity of social networks with the sales potential of eCommerce platforms. This interactive evolution of eCommerce allows for brands to participate directly in customer communities, leveraging their networks to drive sales, increase revenue

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Introduction

and build powerful brand ambassadors that increase traffic back home. The marketing to sales process used to be easy when it was driven mainly by outbound techniques. But with a customer’s path to purchase becoming increasingly non-linear, the traditional marketing pipeline no longer makes sense.

Consider the last time you bought a product online. In all likelihood you first looked up customer reviews, did some research on other websites and contacted friends to see if they were familiar with the brand. You most likely you used social media sites to facilitate this process. This disjointed sales process requires a disjointed marketing strategy involving a strong online presence to help customers come to positive conclusions about your brand.

Social commerce is a win-win for customers and brands. Customers get to feel more secure and confident in their purchases, and brands are able to promote happy customers as advocates for their brand. Customer referrals have proven to the most effective driver of repeat

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sales. Social commerce connects the dots between word of mouth marketing and eCommerce platforms.

Like most new Internet buzzwords, there’s a lot to learn when it comes to actually implementing social strategies in your selling process. The following eBook will lay out how to get started, key trends to follow and the best practices for preserving the blossoming relationship of social media and eCommerce.

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Chapter 1: The Three Dimen-sions of Social Commerce


Chapter 1: The Three Dimensions of Social CommerceSocial commerce can seem a little imposing at first. After all, never before have businesses been able to communicate with customers on such a personal level. But don’t be afraid of rejection. Ultimately the process of leveraging soc ial commerce can be segmented into 3 simple dimensions:

1. Social Shopping: Social shopping seeks to mimic the interactions found in brick and mortar stores by allowing a customer’s friends to be involved in the shopping experience. Group shopping sites (like Groupon), recommendation engines and on-line marketplaces all bring custom-ers together in a central location and allow for an interactive, social experience.

2. Customer Reviews: Giving customers a platform to review products facilitates their ability to

Did you know: According to the New York Times, 65% of new business comes from referrals. A Nielsen study also found that you are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend.

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Chapter 1: The Three Dimen-sions of Social Commerce

come to a secure conclusion about their purchase. By harnessing the wisdom of crowds, positive reviews can be game changers in a customer’s decision to choose your brand. 3. Peer-to-Peer Referrals: Reviews are available to all visitors, but a happy customer will share a peer-to-peer referral with friends and family. This has proven to be the most effective way of driving new sales, as potential customers trust close friends more than an anonymous review on your site.

You may have noticed a common theme here: establishing a trust-based relationship is critical to success on social media.

Shoppers today have an inherent distrust of branded messaging. Instead, they look to friends, family and online communities to build trust in a brand. Neglect your online community at your own peril.

With social refer-ral software built into your eCom-merce platform, you can easily reward custom-ers for sharing information about their pur-chase, referring new friends and driving sales

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Chapter 2: Sellingon Social Networks

Chapter 2: Selling on Social NetworksSo you’ve decided to put down your guard and move into the social sphere. Great job! But now you have to decide what social network to focus on. There are many differences between social platforms, so understanding what’s best for your business is critical to success. Currently, the two big drivers of social commerce are Facebook on Pinterest so let’s pick them apart and see how social commerce impacts both communities:

Facebook

Facebook was a pioneer in the social commerce sector by kicking of the trend way back in 2007. The push was initially met with skepticism but has seen a strong increase in sales referrals over the past couple of months. There are two types of Facebook commerce:

1. Sell directly through Facebook: Generally, this involves a store creating a branded page on Facebook and selling through an application.

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2. Social plug-ins: Facebook makes it possible for companies to implement social sharing plug-ins on their own landing pages, allowing customers to log-in directly with their Facebook account and share their purchases with the entirety of their network.

Selling through Facebook has a number of benefits for online brands. For one, it allows for instantaneous communication between customers and their friends. This can be a huge boon to looping in new fans as customers can rapidly share offers and purchases with close friends. These peer refer-rals are extremely valuable and are much more likely to make a purchase down the road.

JC Penny offers a robust selection of products on its Facebook store, including links on every page to facilitate sharing, commenting and purchasing.

Levi’s Friends Store shows what products a shopper’s friend likes, upcoming birthdays and a number of other social components.

The plug-in is focused more on recommendations than actual pur-chasing, however it is currently one of the most robust implementations of Facebook’s social plug-in for retail.

mentioning and purchasing.

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Facebook is also extremely effective at building customer loyalty. Consistently interacting with your fans builds a per-sonal relationship with the customer that creates strong emotional ties between them and your brand. Offering new deals and exciting offers can help grow this relationship, and will also incentivize loyal fans to go out and advocate on behalf of your brand.

Finally, Facebook pages allow for highly targeted marketing strategies by letting brands pinpoint the exact demographics and interests of their customer base. In this way, your brand can ensure the delivery of relevant content offers and deals to the right fans, improving your CTR and overall fan engagement.

Pinterest

Founded in March 2010, Pinterest has become the fastest-growing social media site on the web, gaining over 140% more users since January 2012 alone. It’s potential for reshaping social commerce cannot be understated: data collected by e-commerce platform Shopify found that not only are Pinterest users 10% more likely to buy than customers referred from other social networks, but are

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likely to spend double the amount per purchase.

Pinterest is a textbook example of social commerce at its most effective. A recent study from ComScore found that visual content is now the most effective influencer of consumer click-through-rates (CTR) and as you may have known, Pinterest is all about visuals. The keys to success on Pinterest are optimizing your images to make them as appealing and accessible as possible so that followers actually want to share it.

Pinterest gives users the opportunity to share products that they’re interested in or repin them for other followers to see. Most important to social commerce however, is the ability to transport followers directly from your pinboard to your site. By sharing images from you eCommerce website, people can click-through and make a purchase almost instantaneously. A customer sees a cool product, they click it, buy it and share it with their friends – it’s social commerce distilled to its most simplistic form.

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B2B Businesses, Take Note

Pinterest may not be the best avenue for a B2B company but if you can break into the market you’ll be targeting customers that your competitors aren’t even aware of. In terms of posting content eBooks, whitepapers and infographics work well because they generally are more information based and offer opportunities to create imaginative, engaging covers.

If you’re a little rusty on posting you could try pinning of pictures/content to your board. It can help build connections with other businesses on the site and help loop in strategic partnerships and customers. If you are able to produce imaginative covers and infographics

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Pinterest is a great place to showcase them. There are a lot of boards dedicated to these types of content that get quite a bit of traffic.Once you have them on your board, you can drive traffic back to your landing pages by including links embedded in your images. The name of the game is conversion and if you’re not bringing people onto your site there’s really no reason to be online. Pinterest may not be the best avenue for B2B lead generation, but if you already have a lot of image-heavy content on hand and optimize the site to bring people to an existing landing page it can prove very useful, at least for bringing in more top of the funnel leads.

What About Twitter?

While Twitter itself does not provide any eCommerce functionality it can be very useful for marketing other social media channels and promoting your products to thousands of followers.

Twitter also allows for continuing to build your online presence and creating a strong, branded community of followers. The micro-blogging platform recently allowed for customized profile pictures and backgrounds, allowing

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brands to tailor their profiles for increased user engagement.

The three main uses of Twitter for social commerce are:

1. Provide time-sensitive offers to followers 2. Leverage Twitter to drive traffic to other social networks3. Establishing a branded Twitter profile

Twitter is a hodgepodge of B2Bs, B2Cs and general fans of your brand. It’s oriented to customer support or general brand engagement. Use it to get discussions going and post call to actions that drive people to a landing page and build communities of supporters.

Although Twitter cannot be used for actually selling, it should be part of a broader strategy to increase awareness and loop in new fans.

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Social Sharing Buttons and You

Ultimately a successful social commerce campaign depends on your brand and customers. But don’t fret! Social media is essentially a free marketing tool, so don’t be afraid to try out both and see what works best.

However, you can use social sharing buttons to integrate both channels into a robust social commerce experience. In fact, it’s highly recommended!

If you’ve ever clicked a “Like” button next to a product or a “Retweet” button on a blog you’ve experienced the power of social sharing buttons. As we’ve said, word of mouth marketing is the most effective way to drive repeat customers and sales so optimizing your social channels for sharing is at the core of a successful social commerce driven business.

The most effective way to do this is through ‘Share’ buttons (Retweet, Like, Share, +1, etc). Every blog post or product page should include a share button to give shoppers the ability to push out recommendations to all of their followers promoting sharing and generating social proof.

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Facebook has even gone so far as to incorporate sharing-capabilities directly into their eCommerce functionalities. The social network recently rolled out Collections – a new feature that allows online brands to add, “Want,” “Collect,” and “Buy” buttons to product posts.

Here’s a quick rundown: clicking “Want” adds a product to a “Wishlist” on a user’s Timeline. “Collect,” adds it to a Pinboard-esque page called “Products.” On the “Wishlist” and “Products” pages, the “Buy” button directs users to make purchases offsite.

Beyond Facebook users, brand pages are also able to create collections to build an online catalogue of all their products. The one difference is company collections are only viewable to their Facebook fans. If pages want more people collecting, resharing and clicking they’re going to need a well-developed fan base.

Facebook’s new features are clearly a win for social brands, and further push online businesses into the realm of social commerce.

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Chapter 3: Getting Started with Social Commerce

Chapter 3: Getting Started with Social CommerceSo you’ve got all your social networks set-up, your eCommerce site is live and you’re ready to get started on building am engaged community of supporters. The question is, how do you actually go about developing a social commerce-driven brand?

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Here are 4 things to keep in mind when getting started:

1. Outline Your Objectives: What are you trying to achieve with your new model? Is your goal to acquire new customers, or maybe to convert customers into advocates? Determining the ultimate goals you’re trying to reach will help structure your program accordingly and determine the appropriate metrics with which to measure success.

2. Create a Promotional Strategy: You’ve made a Facebook brand page, but what else will you do to generate a strong brand presence? There is little room for organic growth on social media sites making implementing a promotional strategy critical to ensuring people are aware of your brand. Some options include word of mouth campaigns, outbound advertising and media integrations but ultimately you must determine what works for your own brand.

3. Create Content to Establish Your Authority: Any type of original content, be it photos, blog posts or videos, is a great way to engage your fans in conversations relevant to your products. Over time your content will grow into a library that establishes credibility and authority for your brand and build a lasting community in the process.

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4. Integrate Social Commerce Into a Multi-Channel Strategy: Social commerce may be a large part of your sales strategy, but it is not the only one. It is important to determine what effect social commerce will have on other marketing channels and how you can support and integrate your marketing programs to optimize conversions and sales.

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Chapter 4: Analytics and You

Chapter 4: Analytics and YouThroughout the duration of your social commerce campaign, you should be tracking all of your metrics through social media analytics. Otherwise, you’ll be unable to determine what’s working and what’s getting lost in the blogosphere.

As a rule of thumb, be careful to avoid “vanity” metrics and make sure you’re focusing on actionable metrics that can actually inform your business strategy. A lot of the data social media sites offer is fluff (fans and likes for example). Measuring your success based on these metrics may show a high ROI but you’re not getting the whole story.

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If you’re measuring things like bounce rates, click through rates, etc you’d be looking at metrics that tie actions to real results.

Choosing the right metrics also depends on the types of goals you’re looking to get from social media. For example, if you’re looking to measure customer engagement with your brand, focus on:

• Sitevisits• Numberofcomments/uniquecommentersonyour blog • Quantity/frequencyofreviews,comments,discussions, etc. • Contentsharingfrequency(retweets,Facebookposts, etc.) • Siteaffinity/likelihoodtoinfluenceotherfriends

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These metrics can be tied to actual results from your online strategy and can help you optimize your marketing program. As a general rule, 3 important thoughts to keep in mind are:

• Measurewhatmatterstothehealthofyourbusiness.• Measurecustomerbehavior,notintermediatesteps.• Measuremacrometricstopinpointwhatneedsim provement.

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Conclusion

ConclusionToday’s customers are more active in social media than ever before. They review products and services, refer friends back to brands and share experience across social media channels. Along all steps of the purchasing process – from awareness to purchase to brand advocacy – companies should work to develop a socially driven shopping experience and promote sharing across all social media channels.

Social commerce integration may be relatively new, but the underlying concepts behind it date back to the early days of civilization: we are all social creatures, community minded and driven by recommendations from friends and family. Social media has opened the door to leveraging these tendencies for commercial gain. It’s now up to online brands to step through it.

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ConclusionAn Introduction toSocial Commerce

Ambassador enables any company to easily track, manage & reward their advocates for referring customers and driving conversions. Receive actionable channel-spe-cific metrics; including shares, clicks, conversions, revenue and clicks per share. Ambassador can be fully integrated into your website, maintaining your look & feel while providing a frictionless experience for your advocates.

Date post:	18-Oct-2014
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When Social Met eCommerce: An Introduction Social Commerce

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