Social Media Commerce: Why Your e-Commerce Platform Alone Will Not Cut the Mustard

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Today’s era of Covid 19 is sufficient proof of the convenience that comes with social media e-commerce.

Many of your existing as well as prospective consumers remain stuck at home today. Social media e-commerce is one of the strategies your business can adopt to help people practice ‘social distance” while you continue to increase your sales.

But how will consumers discover your small brand or products out there while stuck at home?

Social content makes that possible.

Social content provides a level playing ground by making brands and products more discoverable. Customers can easily find the smallest brands which they would otherwise not even know existed.

Through social content, your brand can create meaningful relationships with customers. These kinds of relationships help you build trust with prospective customers and eventually create brand loyalty. 

Today, people are increasingly getting attached to their smartphones and social media, and your business cannot afford to ignore this fact.

With creative, engaging, and shareable content, your brand has the capability of influencing social media to make your content viral.

Social Commerce Today

Over time, social media has continued to merge with e-commerce giving rise to social commerce with promising outcomes. 60% of Instagram users, for example, have discovered new products through the platform.

WeChat is a classic example of how well social media can impact the e-commerce market. According to Emarketer, social commerce sales account for 11.6% of retail e-commerce in China. 

Through creative strategies such as digital advertising and influencer marketing, many brands have driven traffic to their e-commerce stores on WeChat.

They have also been able to tailor their campaigns, providing their customers with a unique customer experience that cannot be replicated by other brands.

Most social media platforms today have borrowed e-commerce features from WeChat.

Snapchat has created a feature that will allow you to attach your products and enable your customers to access more information on your brand and even make purchases just by tapping on it.

Facebook, on the other hand, facilitates the use of chatbots by brands to make your customer service more effective and help customers complete purchases.

Snapchat has a visual feature allowing users to direct their cameras on a product they are interested in or its barcode. This will redirect them to Amazon, where they can complete the purchase of the products.

Given that 82% of consumers are yet to use any form of social commerce, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Today, the use of cash payments is steadily declining, leaving a gap that social commerce can comfortably fill despite the challenges it is currently facing in terms of privacy and security.

The Future of Social Media E-Commerce

Social media is no longer just about helping your customers find products but also actualizing the purchasing right there on the platform.

Today, people have embraced social media and are allowing it to guide their buying decisions — think about customer reviews on social media, for example. Most social media users are vocal and will share their experiences and comment about products they have used and brands they have interacted with, influencing other users’ purchasing decisions on the platform.

It is important to note that social media offers a very volatile platform. That means, to have an effective social media strategy, you need to stay updated on trends and changes happening in that space to take full advantage of the platforms.

For a successful social media presence, you want people to interact with your brand. To do that, make sure you proactively craft and upload engaging content that will attract the platform users and have them talking about your brand or product.

Like WeChat, which is already a success in Asia, social platforms should not focus on just making sales. They should also help build relationships and create trust with prospective clients by engaging with them throughout the purchasing process.

WeChat has been able to achieve tremendous success by integrating social networks and communication platforms with e-commerce. Therefore, the future of e-commerce lies in building relationships with social media users to get to understand them better and hence create online communities that are defined by their distinct interests. Through these online communities, brands will engage with prospective clients as opposed to randomly chasing people to make a purchase.

Success in e-commerce means flexibility and personalization in payment methods, social content, shopping experience, and social interactions. That is what social commerce has to offer.

The future of e-commerce is in integrating social media and e-commerce applications. Its success is dependent on trust as well as mutual values between your brand and your prospective customers. Nike has done this, and your e-commerce business can benefit from following in its footsteps. However, do not forget to stay woke to the changing trends to take full advantage of social media.

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