Over the past decade, social media has been utilized by retail and brand marketers to engage with customers, market products and sometimes even to make merchandising decisions. Social promotions, content marketing, sponsored posts and customer reviews are carefully engineered to build consideration, awareness and intent to gain and retain customers. However, now merchants are adding “the sell” to the list of things that they are doing on social sites.
Social is now a core element to any company’s digital marketing strategy and is a well-established channel to bring in sales. The shopper’s journey has changed drastically becoming less and less linear. The consumer is able to utilize social to help make decisions in the journey by seeing what others are doing what they have done. Social channels use sharing, reviews, recommendations, popularity lists, etc. to help move the consumer along to make the decision and purchase the product/service. This year, brands and retailers are beginning to test out and include social commerce options as part of their omni-channel and customer experience strategies. As companies are coming through data and figuring out how people make their purchases, adding a buy button will give the consumer further opportunity to take that interest to checkout. Because it will help with personalize and tailor more direct advertising, testing out online shopping are likely to gain traction with every social network. Some retailers such as Target, Nordstrom and Home Depot have already started participating in the new social ecommerce trend by testing “buy” buttons or the “Like2Buy” platform.
What social sites are next?
Sites such as Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat and more are starting to gain traction on social commerce with the addition of the “buy” button or “Like2Buy” platform, showing us that social is going to get a lot more shoppable this year!
- Pinterest – Pinterest is one of my absolute favorite sites to visit and I have found that if I pin an item that I like or share from another’s pin, I often cannot find the source of that item. Therefore leaving me sad that I cannot purchase the item I really love. But now that is all going to change!! Pinterest officially marked its presensce in eCommerce with rolling out the buy pins on Apple Devices following their announcement in early June. They also seem to be positioned to have more success than other social channels (Facebook & Twitter) allowing consumers, like me, to buy items that someone else has pinned or that you have pinned, yourself. Instagram and Google are also planning to add online shopping options on their sites and ads as well.
- Instagram – (owned by FB) is planning to expand their ad platform to allow other businesses options such as “shop now”, “learn more”, “download”, etc. Clicking the button will take the consumer to an app store to purchase (if its an app they are searching for) or a section of the advertiser’s mobile site within Instagram’s browser.
- Google – has plans to add “buy” buttons on its shopping advertisements
We can expect to see this trend expand to other sites as well (Tinder, Snapchat). Social commerce is going to continue to grow and it will be an interesting watch to see what other social channels will also incorporate e-commerce features.
Infographic Stat Sources: HubSpot Blogs
