Social commerce marketplace is the use of social media to facilitate e-commerce transactions. Social media is the place where content goes viral. Social commerce sells products directly through social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. Social commerce makes the purchase process much more convenient and seamless for the customer. It also increases sales by driving traffic, increasing customer engagement and website traffic.
Social Commerce offers a myriad of business benefits for your brand. Many people think about whether social e-commerce will work for their business or not. Social commerce brings eCommerce functionality directly into social media platforms. Social media platforms are useful to make a more personalized and targeted in-app experience shopping experience for customers. Social media like Facebook allows brands to advertise, interact, and sell their products/services on a large scale. When customers are satisfied with your business, social media makes it easy for them to share and recommend your brand.
The biggest benefit to adopting a social commerce strategy is that it makes the buying process simple and easy. Social Commerce marketplaces enable both consumers and vendors to communicate with one another and each other. Most of the customers look at social media for a better buying decision, and three-fourths among these bought an item as they have seen it on social media. Your customer no longer has to leave the social commerce website they were on, and they can check out easily and seamlessly, and then carry on scrolling your site.
In this article, we are going to know in-depth about all aspects of social commerce and how it is beneficial to the customers.
Difference between Social Commerce and eCommerce
E-commerce takes place on your website, using a platform such as Shopify to facilitate the sale of goods. Social media advertising is used to find potential buyers, the process has essentially been to attract those buyers to your website where they can make a purchase.
Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce that enables customers to purchase directly within the social media platform. Social media has made eCommerce and social commerce a new form of business for product sellers or suppliers. E-commerce and social commerce do not require a large investment because you will not sell directly to customers but sell services and products electronically.
In eCommerce, there are many shopping cart platforms that provide the ease of use feature. With social commerce, buying products is more accessible because it is common and used on any social media. You only need to know how to set up an account for your store with a small investment and you can use social media for your business development.
Types of Social commerce
There are five main types of Social Commerce Marketplace, they are:-
1. Community Driven
Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest comes under community-driven marketplaces. They offer a chat and sharing feature.
2. Platform Driven
Platform driven social commerce sells the products, and brings people together to make a purchase. As an individual, you can also start your own online marketplace and generate sales.
3. Group Driven
Group driven is quite different from community-driven social commerce. In this, the group members don’t know each other, but they join in together to purchase items for a lower cost.
4. Peer Driven
In peer-driven social commerce, customers share what they have purchased from that online store. When people see what their friends or families are buying, they are more likely to buy them.
5. User-Driven
The user-driven social commerce allows sellers for recommendations, voting, feedback, and also creating products that the user likes. Anyone can create a list of products as per users likings, that will help drive sales.
Most popular Social Commerce platforms:-
You can sell products online through a variety of social media platforms. There are various social media platforms that infuse the ecommerce features among them. It would be really interesting to know briefly about these platforms. Here we are discussing in brief about the major social commerce platforms:-
1. Facebook
Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms to start your social commerce plan. This platform enables best ways of introducing social commerce and generating sales. You can directly showcase your products on Facebook, and can redirect users to your online store for conversion. Upload your products and related info into your social commerce platform. Users can easily buy your products from there once you have your product catalog setup done. You can also see the number of customers purchasing products, how your ad campaign is working, and other details.
2. Instagram
Instagram is another popular platform for social commerce companies. It introduced a shopping feature on its platform in 2016. Users can see your products’ posts and then click to quickly purchase them. Many companies are preferring Instagram because most of the users discover new products on Instagram. You see a list of products in your post, select them and place orders within the Instagram application. Instagram Ads can help you broaden your audience.
Also Read: Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins
3. Twitter
Twitter is the best social media platform that makes it easy for your followers to purchase your products directly from there. While you tweet a product, include a buy button so that if someone sees a photo of your product, they can click on the button and buy it immediately from there. This makes it easy to sell your product and get new customers.
4. Pinterest
Pinterest social media platform helps users to buy products easily. This platform is a photo and video based platform, so it makes it easy to integrate information about your products to sell to leads. On Pinterest, the ecommerce owners can create buyable pins. These are pins where you post your product and a link to purchase the product. Pinterest understands the users’ choices and shows them products as per their interests.
Some Social Commerce Marketplace tactics you can use
To help you get your social commerce strategy off to the very best start, we are going to share some marketing strategies to help you out. They will help you get up and running your social commerce marketplace as fast as possible.
1. Improve Facebook Messenger engagement.
Facebook Messenger comes with tools like manyChat. It can help you turn your engagements on Facebook into automated ChatBots through Messenger. It’s a great way to drive Messenger engagement.
2. Lower-priced items sell better
If you’re selling luxury furniture you might not get a response as compared to lower-priced retailers. There is a reason behind that, when splashing out on something expensive they want to ‘try before buy’, and the fact that buying through the internet makes that impossible. The lower-priced products perform better. Mostly social media shoppers do not consider expensive products.
3. Integrate social commerce into your ecommerce platform
Integrating social commerce into your eCommerce platform means keeping updated with the latest trends. Try to integrate your new social commerce stores with your existing ecommerce platform. Doing this is not easy that’s why around 51% of marketers are doing it.
4. Create automated bot checkouts.
When it comes to buying goods and services through a social platform, every buyer doesn’t have that same shopping experience, unless you implement an automated bot checkout. You can get an automated checkout bot up and running within minutes and, thanks to their numerous native integrations, you can use it across almost all social media platforms.
Tips that help you to grow your social marketplace
Combining social media features to an eCommerce marketplace is a perfect recipe to drive a large number of users. But there are several key factors that are helpful for steady marketplace growth. Let’s discuss about few of them here:
1. Choose the right platform
Choose the right platform for using social commerce. Your shop is only effective if it is on a platform where your customers engage regularly. Do not campaign on a platform that your audience doesn’t check. So analyze your target audience and do campaigns for your social media commerce store.
2. Build your brand
People buy products online only from trusted brands. You need to build your brand to get more audience. Customers only buy products if they know that they are getting a good product from a great company.
3. Target your audience
When you create a social commerce plan, you need to focus on your target market. The point of social media commerce is to get your target audience. For this you need to focus on showcasing products that you know your audience wants to buy. You can also look at previous buying to figure out which products appeal to your audience.
4. Community Building
The social commerce marketplace is the perfect platform to grow your online community. Direct communication with consumers is the biggest benefit of a social commerce marketplace. It also enables businesses to truly engage, interact, and reply to the consumer queries building a stronger bond. Customers create a community where they can communicate and engage with each other providing them great experience. When other shoppers see these images it gives them trust in the brand.
5. User-Generated Content
Use generated content influences the users buying decision. Generate effective content to strengthen the social commerce marketplace. Content is an effective tool to sell and resell items for users and brands alike. It also provides a better promotion and opportunities for growth.
6. Meet customer needs with streamlined stores
With the social media platforms, you will get in-depth analysis reports plus tracking tools by which you can tailor your offering to your patrons. Be selective about what you sell on the social media platform. Know the likings of your audiences and provide only the most-desired items which they like.
7. Eliminates Online Shopping Obstacles
Any user who finds hassle or any difficulty in opening ecommerce stores and entering all the details can easily purchase items from the social media platform. As there are reviews or feedback mentioned in the product details, the research phase is also shortened.
8. Responsiveness
Customer support team should be helpful and must respond to you in a timely manner. Timely response to customers’ requests is a crucial thing in the customer experience. This shows that the brand cares for their customer and hence quickly answers to their query at any time.
9. Social Experience
Social elements like private messaging, news feed section, chatting, comment, and more in a marketplace create an engaging network for users and brands. Best social experience enables people to easily connect and shop from the closets of other fashion lovers.
10.Make it mobile-friendly
Now mostly people make purchases on their mobile phones. It is important to create a mobile friendly experience for your audience. It provides your audience with an easy and painless checkout process.
11. Offer Incentives
The brands use multiple social commerce programs to provide offers and incentives to their audience through every social media platform they use. Customers can share their favorite products with their kin in exchange for a discount.
12.Encourage people to review your business
Encourage your customers or site visitors to review your business for building a successful brand. This is a great way to build trust with new leads. When users rank or review your business, other people see and decide if your business is right for them. It’s a great way to provide users an opportunity to know your business.
Conclusion:-
That’s it! You must have understood from this article that social commerce matters a lot in today’s time. Hope you like this article. If any query write in the comment section.
Interesting Read:
How to Establish Trust in your Marketplace Community?
Free Ways to Gain Instant Website Traffic
Factors to Consider Before Hiring a Web Development Firm for an Ecommerce Venture
