How social commerce can effectively help you boost your online store sales

With nearly one-third of the world's population being on social media, you can't say no to social commerce anymore. Being one of the most promising sales strategies, social commerce trends changes by the minute. Here are some of our tips and tricks to help you master this marketing game.

POS at a Retail Store/ Blake Wisz from Unsplash

• What is social commerce? Social commerce is a form of online commerce where users can purchase products directly from a social media network without leaving the platform.
• Which is the most promising social commerce platform? Based on recent statistics, Facebook is considered to be the most popular social commerce platform, catering to about 85% of social media orders.
• Where can I find more marketing tips? Please feel free to explore our blog category for more marketing tips and tricks.

When Facebook first launched their virtual gift test back in 2007, little did we know that it would begin a whole new world of commerce on the web. As the name suggests, social commerce is about selling products directly via social media networks. The difference between social media marketing and social commerce lies in the fact that for the latter, you can directly checkout within the network you’re using at the moment instead of getting redirected to a third party website.

Considering the fact that we have 1.59 billion daily active users on Facebook, you can say that social media networks are a powerhouse for grabbing new users. With social commerce, you’ll actually be giving these users the opportunity to buy products without leaving the network. So, quite naturally, this can not only boost your sales but also help you build a more engaging sales funnel in the long run.

Digital POS Checkout at a Retail Store

In fact, based on online social media trends, 30% of shoppers have said that they would prefer to shop from a social media network like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat. Over the years, social commerce trends have been changing a lot which can make rethink your entire marketing plan for the year ahead. Let’s take a look at some of the recent social commerce trends that can help you boost your online store sales in the coming months.

Tip: With the holiday shopping season almost around the corner, it’s crucial for you to begin channeling these ideas now. 

Set Up Facebook Messenger with ManyChat

With tools like ManyChat, you can easily set up your Facebook Messenger in a way to drive direct sales from post engagement. So, for example, if someone comments on your post asking for the price of a product, you could directly send them a message in Messenger with the option of instant checkout.

For channels other than Facebook, you can also opt for Zapier integrations.

Use Jumper.Ai for Automated Checkout

Working across different social media networks, Jumper.ai is a pre-built automated checkout chatbot. You can easily use this chat for attaching discounts, products, personalized carts, request payments, sharing order status, and so much more. Together with the AI-automated responses and self-checkout options, this app can make social commerce so much easier for you.

Utilize the Social Commerce Apps for Your Ecommerce Platform

Be it Shopify or BigCommerce, you can easily find apps that can help you enhance your social commerce game from your online store. So whether it’s about providing specific discounts for your Facebook users or retargeting your Instagram users, you can do it all by using specific social commerce apps directly from your ecommerce platform.

Shopping from a Tablet / Brooke Larke from Unsplash

Get the Email No Matter What

For every purchase that happens via your social media network, you need to make sure you grab the email address of the customer. This will help you in retargeting ads in the future as well as building an email subscriber list for future discounts and newsletter funnel.

Engage As Much As You Can

The key to a successful social media game is engagement. So, whenever you’re building a social commerce funnel, you need to ensure you are doing enough engagement on your social media channels. By engagement, we mean interacting with your users, commenting on other profiles relevant to yours and being out there as much as you can. That way, you can eventually drive more sales instead of being too sale-sy from the beginning.

Micro-Influencing is the Future

Whenever it comes to social media engagement, brands look forward to influencers for bringing those first customers. However, over the years, the entire influencing industry has grown a lot which is why trends and statistics say a lot more than before. The recent trends say that influencers with less than 35,000 followers have the highest engagement rate which is about 5.3%. So, if you want to make user of influencers for selling your products, try to go for the ones with less followers but a unique audience base.

With that said, we feel that social commerce is something which will update itself very frequently as compared to other industry standards. What do you think? Share with us in the comments below.