Social media platforms are hugely dynamic with constant technological changes, utility evolution, and feature advancements that are made to deliver an ingenious and superior consumer experience.
Similarly, Consumer demands are also ever-changing and volatile making it difficult for social media platforms and Businesses to cope with them. Consumers seek a one-stop-shop where they can satisfy their browsing and shopping demands.
And social commerce has emerged as a counter-mechanism to satisfy these demands of consumers through the integration of shopping experiences with social media browsing.
Let’s explore what is social commerce?
What Is Social Commerce?
Social commerce is the unification of online shopping and social browsing where social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest are exploited as a medium to promote and merchandise products/offerings by a business.
Social commerce is a much-needed element in today’s world as it shortens the buyer’s journey of researching, finding, comparing, evaluating, and purchasing a product from different web pages and websites.
And converts the point-of-inspiration into point-of-sale allowing the users to buy it in real-time with minimal clicks through social networks.
The key benefit of social commerce is that it is tackling the high bounce rates, low conversions, cart abandonment, and low engagement issues faced by businesses in the digital spectrum.
It has been stated that 30% of social media users i.e. 500 million users daily want to buy products directly from the social platform. And this is a piece of evidence as to why social commerce matters for online commerce.
We have listed a few social commerce trends that you can master this year. It will help you to attract leads, gain better conversions, amplify awareness, drive engagement, and grow revenue.
1. Visuals Are Necessity
Visual content has become more important than ever with people being visual creatures consuming an endless amount of images and videos daily.
Visual content has a 65% better recall value with content containing images getting 94% more engagement.
Even 71% of marketers use visuals in their social media content.
The integration of high-quality product images live videos, product review videos, and user-generated visual content grabs users’ attention instantly, and hooks them for extended engagement with the business.
We all have experienced this at one point in our life where we want to buy something that we came across social media feeds but did not know where to look for it.
Social commerce simplifies it for us by linking attractive visuals of the products to the buying option making the life of the consumer much easier and simpler.
2. Shoppable Feeds Integration
With the growing influence of social media on people’s lives and their decisions in real-life, social platforms have further commercialized their channels to make it more engaging and interesting.
And this is the best time for your business to take advantage of this social commerce spectrum.
You should also integrate shoppable feeds feature to your social profiles and link it to your eCommerce website to provide a wholesome experience to consumers. Embedding Shoppable Instagram feed is also the best way for E-commerce website integration.
Shoppable content are those which are automatically collected user-generated photos and videos featuring products, via hashtags, tags and mentions from Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, allowing visitors to shop the product directly from the posts.
Instead of promoting products through content and then redirect the interested people to the product page/website. You should sell it directly from the promotional content.
This will save time, money, and effort for both businesses and consumers. Besides, it is a walk in the park to make any post shoppable through easy to use and implement social commerce tools.
3. Promote Social Proof Through UGC
Social campaigns with UGC get 50% more engagement, especially brand marketing through UGC content get almost 7 times higher interest and engagement.
This shows how UGC is important for any marketer and business. Social commerce is a place that can best employ user-generated content for best results both monetary and subjective.
This year you could harness quality relevant user-generated content from social platforms and re-market it as social proof for your brand.
Over 51% of the consumers would engage or purchase from a brand that uses User-generated content such as product images, videos, experiences or reviews on their social platforms.
You could integrate shoppable posts with UGC to increase eCommerce conversions. As trust, authenticity, security, positive brand image, and validation to your content is necessary for your business to attract consumers, enable engagement, and amplify conversions.
4. Optimize the Shopping Experience
The key thing for the success of any digital platform is how good the shopping experience they provide throughout the purchase funnel of the consumer.
Consumers like shopping where they have to invest minimal time and effort i.e. bring the point of sale closer to point of inspiration. Social commerce is a great way to customize the consumer experience.
Consumer experience is a key derivative of building brand community, loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and driving engagement.
And optimizing consumer experience through social commerce will reduce cart abandonment, bounce rate, and drop rate which will ensure that the purchase funnel is completed by consumers leading to higher conversions and revenue.
Best Social Commerce Platform — Taggbox Commerce
Taggbox Commerce is an Social Commerce platform that aims to help marketers to increase user engagement, build trust, and drive conversions with various social commerce solutions.
It helps you throughout the whole process from collecting UGC from social media to displaying shoppable galleries on your website. You can aggregate content and tag your products in the images and videos to make them shoppable.
This will help you shorten the entire consumer journey, increasing engagement and boosting conversions for your store.
You can try the 14-day Free Trial and know what wonders it can do yourself!
To Conclude
Social commerce is a developing field and with the emergence of influencers, social shopping, and online retail. It is accompanied by the influence of social media on consumers, it has become even more essential to businesses.
Social commerce is an opportunity for your business to exploit the first-mover’s advantage and grow revenue, customer base, and distinctive brand identity.
So, make sure you exploit these trends to keep yourself ahead of the competition and retrieve maximum juice from this social commerce fruit.
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