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Benefits of Social Commerce for Business

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Eugene Gray
Benefits of Social Commerce for Business

In 2020, the retail industry was driven nearly fully online due to the COVID pandemic. In the absence of physical store visits and the decreased effectiveness of real-world advertising, the situation stimulated a growing competition for customers in the digital field. 


With nearly everyone using social media these days, platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and others became the main battlefields among companies. Here, social commerce, which allows brands to sell their products and services directly through social media channels, stands out as an important tool in attracting customer attention and boosting sales. Let’s take a closer look at the main benefits that social selling provides to companies so that you can make a weighted decision about whether this can become a part of your company’s digital marketing strategy.


Increased brand awareness

Without influences and celebrities, social media would be unthinkable. The opinions of these people can both boost a brand’s appeal or drive customers away. Collaboration with influencers through social media in ways that feel relevant to the target audience can greatly assist a company in increasing customer awareness of the brand and its offerings of products & services.


Improved audience reach

Properly implemented, social commerce can be one of the most effective methods for businesses to reach new markets and audience segments. Many social media and messaging platforms are popular worldwide, so setting up shops on these platforms can get your business new loyal customers, even without an active physical presence or ad campaigns.


Convenient shopping

Social commerce eliminates the common reasons for cart abandonment, such as lengthy registration process or complicated website logic. Customers may check out straight in the app, without having to join up, log in (remember password), or fill out lengthy forms. With social commerce, the buyer is already logged in to the app and has their payment information ready. They just see what they like, click on it, and buy — three simple steps.


Social proof

Social media is an interactive experience. People interact with their friends and listen to their recommendations. All of this happens through UGC or user-generated content, such as reviews, comments, stories, reels, and live streams that include brand mentions and relevant tags. Such content works toward reinforcing customer trust, sometimes even more effectively than traditional advertising with high-profile personalities or big-budget production.


Precise audience targeting

With so much data provided by social media channels, marketers can target their ads with accuracy hardly achievable in email or phone marketing. Speaking directly to the ideal audience of your products allows a company to optimize marketing costs, improve conversion, and take a more personalized approach to customer communication.


Bigger average order

Using social commerce to promote exclusive discounts and offers is a viable strategy for maximizing the amount of spend per customer. First of all, this makes the brand’s followers feel the direct benefits of engaging with your company on social media, which leads to larger and/or more frequent purchases, and secondly, it attracts new people to engage with the brand on these platforms, consequentially growing its customer base.


Long-term loyalty

Nowadays, customers factor in a brand’s values to a much higher degree than before. Sustainability, equality, and inclusivity — such values can be effectively shown through various audio & visual formats offered by social media and messaging platforms. And the time while followers appreciate your content is surely one of the most appropriate moments to provide them with ways to become customers — this is what social media shopping does, in a seamless and simple way. 

 

Summing things up

Social commerce is expected to become the main channel of sales and marketing for even more industries and market niches in the near future. Messaging and social media platforms have an enormous potential for e-commerce, and it is getting bigger still as these platforms increase their functionality and introduce the latest technologies, such as AR-reality, chatbots, NFTs, and metaverse into the everyday lives of people. A must-have tactic of any modern business, social selling benefits every party involved, providing profit-boosting strategies for companies, as well as a frictionless and seamless shopping experience for customers.


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Eugene Gray
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