Have you come across products or services displayed on posts on Social Media channels and wondered what they are? Want to know how can you create these posts? Want to find more about it? Then check this blog post where we will cover all aspects of social commerce and shopable posts..
Simplified, social commerce allows consumers to buy a product or service directly from a social media channel. Basically, the discovery of the product, information about it and the checkout process takes place on the social media platform.
According to “Statista 2021” research shows that 11% of social media users make a purchase immediately after discovering a product or service. Furthermore, 8 in 10 US businesses anticipate selling on social media platforms within the next 3 years. These figures show that social commerce has exploded over the last years and a substantial amount of purchase is motivated by impulse buying.
In the early days of social media brands, businesses used social platforms (Facebook , Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter) only to post images or short videos about their products or services. Now, because of a plethora of social media native social commerce tools businesses, brand can sell their products or services directly on these social media channels. The customers does not have to leave the platform as they have the option to See it, Click it or Buy it the product or service.
Social commerce solves an issue that many buyers faced when trying to buy a product or service. Most of the times buying process takes time and involves clicking or leaving the social platform (going to an e-commerce website) in order to buy the item. Now, if a customer discovers a product or service on social media channels he/she no longer require leaving the platform.
At the moment social media platforms that offer social commerce services are:
- TikTok
- YouTube (is planning to offer this service in the near future too, that’s why it’s mentioned here).
In order to set up and use the native social commerce services in the above social media channels you have to switch to a professional profile. This is done during the installation or afterwards (is an easy process anyway). In Facebook this is done via your page settings.
You can sell almost anything on these platforms. However, some items such as digital products, weapons, alcohol, cigarettes, subscriptions, event tickets are prohibited. If you intend to use social commerce it is a good practice to check the merchant guidelines for the each social media channel network.
Facebook and Instagram Shopping allows users to manually create a catalog of products or service or upload an existing catalogue from ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce (WordPress e-commerce plugin), Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento(CMS).
At the moment TikTok Shopping is only available to Shopify merchants with a TikTok business account. TikTok Shopping allows the content creators to directly sell products and promote products or services on the platform.
As a tip when adding product images focus on image quality and style. Every product has to have at least 4 high resolution images and at least three attributes such as size, colour, and material.
Product description should include as many details as possible, use business phrases, keywords. Bear in mind that the product title should not have more than 34 characters.You could add business keywords in it too. You can add links in the product description too but at the minute they are not clickable. The general idea is that every field from the product or service catalogue should be populated.
TikTok Shopping is only granted for UK, US customers and for Canadian (only few companies) customers. This is expected to change in the near future.
Pinterest allows users to convert all entire product catalog into Rich Pins, all at once. Pinterest rich pins works by displaying metadata from marked up pages (product, shop) from your business, brand website. If you’re using Shopify for your online ecommerce store you don’t have to do any extra work as the products metadata is already by default.
It is proven that when businesses add Collections Ads Shopping to their Pinterest mix, they see an increase of 3x the conversion and 2x the positive incremental return on ad spend (ROAS). Pretty awesome isn’t it?
According to the latest statistics buyers on Pinterest spend up to 40% more per month than shoppers on other social commerce platforms. Don’t have Pinterest set up? Let Ryan Marketing Solutions help you.
Did you know that on average viewers are watching over 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV daily? That’s why YouTube is enlarging the ways content creators can monetize their content(educational videos, entertaining videos, conversational streams, life blogs, playing games videos, etc), interact with viewers, and create new ideas for their social media own channels.
YouTube Shorts is getting new tools, features (video effects, ability to reply to comments, enhanced editing capabilities) in 2022. YouTube Shopping (Shoppable Videos, Live Shopping) is going to be generally expanded on across the platform more widely. If your business sells products or services online YouTube Shopping is a tool that you can’t afford to miss.
Now, the question is how to convert your social media followers into customers. There is not a magic formula to do this. But if you integrate shoppable tags in your posts, allow UGC (User Generated Content), answer questions and offer interesting and valuable content the chances are that some of your followers will turn into customers.
Another way of turning followers into customers is to utilize influencers. But many of us don’t know how to find these influencers or do not know what they are.
An influencer is a person that has the potential to persuade potential buyers of a product or service by recommending or promoting the items on social media platforms. To find an influencer for your market niche you have to do hash tags searches, check your competition follower list, use Google searches or use influencer marketing tools such as BrandWatch, Awario, Brand24, etc.
If you researched and discovered influencers first step is to select the influencers with the highest engagement rate and big follower number. Some of them would require a payment for content creation, promotion and some would do this pro bono (challenge to find them nowadays).
The idea to use influencer marketing is that they have the power to bring customers to your business. For example, when an influencer uses shoppable tags on Instagram, they push the potential buyers to your shop.
Final Thoughts
We all know that social media is a very powerful tool at our disposal. It’s up to us to discover and utilise all of its features. This social media trend is still on the expansion (many new channels and feature), meaning you’ll want your business to jump on board as soon as possible so you don’t get left behind (can you afford that?).
If your business is looking for Digital Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Consulting & Coaching services don’t hesitate to contact Ryan Marketing Solutions. . If you find the information from this blog post useful please share it with your friends.
