The emergence of social media completely transformed the marketing scenario as it allowed brands to connect with their customers via this medium.
With over 58.11% of the world’s population on social media, it serves as an influential platform for brands to target their potential customers.
We say influential because social media has the potential to influence your potential customers to become your existing customers.
It did not take brands too long to realize that apart from influencing, social media has a great potential to sell and promote products and services as well.
This gave rise to social commerce and completely changed the marketing game for brands and businesses.
In this blog, we will tell you about social shopping- the integration of social media with shopping and how leveraging it can change the marketing game.
What is Social Commerce?
In simple terms, social commerce means the process of selling, promoting, and buying products on social media platforms.
It is a win-win situation for both brands and customers since it gives brands a chance to sell and promote their products on the platform. At the same time, it allows the brands, customers to discover their preferred products and complete the buying process without having to leave the platform.
Social media was mainly used by brands to communicate and connect with their friends, relatives, family and make other connections.
If you are wondering about the inception of social commerce, it all began when visual-dominated platforms like Instagram and Pinterest came into existence. Surprisingly, brand users started taking their shopping inspiration from these visually vibrant platforms.
Moreover, social commerce allows users to share, like, comment, and recommend brands and their products on social media, which is an added advantage for brands as it multiplies the power of influence.
Since you are now aware of social commerce and its backstory and definition, in the next section, we will be talking about the reasons why you should include this strategy in your business.
Reasons Why You Need To Include Social Commerce
Genuine Engagement From Users
Getting engagement from the audience is what brands majorly aim at. Social commerce allows brands to drive authentic engagement from their customers.
Brands drive genuine engagement from their audience since it allows users to interact with the brands personally, unlike an e-Commerce platform.
Users can react to posts by liking, commenting, sharing the posts, or sending their reviews to the brands via direct message.
This results in direct and authentic attention and engagement from the brand’s users, which ultimately leads to more conversions and sales.
Better Brand-User Relationship
Social commerce gives brands a chance to improve relationships with their customers. The more you engage with your brands, the more chance you can improve your relationship with your customers.
Once you connect with the customers personally by replying to their comments and acknowledging their reviews and queries humbly, the users start seeing the brand in a different light and as responsive.
The more the connection, the better would be the relationship. Just be careful not to discriminate between the customers as both the existing and potential customers are equally important for your brand’s growth and success.
A Chance To Grow Your Audience
One of the biggest reasons brands must utilize social commerce is to give brands a chance to grow their brand reach and boost their audience count.
Social media is a constantly growing platform. Every day, thousands of people create an account on various social media platforms to utilize the platform.
The major concern for all brands and businesses is how to increase their brand awareness, exposure, and reach out to their target audience. Since social commerce involves brands selling on social platforms, it allows them to grow their audience tremendously and reach their potential target customers.
Offers A Seamless Checkout Process
Using social commerce, brands can give their users a quick, easy, and frictionless shopping journey.
As compared to a regular e-commerce website shopping experience, social commerce is comparatively seamless as it allows users to complete the journey without leaving the platform.
A regular customer journey involves multiple steps starting from product discoverability to the checkout process that makes the users fill in multiple details to complete the process.
This ultimately leads to cart abandonment and agitation within customers.
On the other hand, social commerce enables the users to finish the checkout process in a few clicks leading to a happier customer experience.
Closing Note
We have reached the conclusion part of the blog, and you are now aware of the definition and many benefits of social commerce.
This strategy is surely the best in the marketing ecosystem and needs to be leveraged by all brands. Most e-Commerce businesses are actively using the strategy as a part of their marketing efforts. If you, too, are an e-commerce brand, then you need to incorporate social commerce into your business to reap the benefits.
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User-generated content (UGC) is dominating the market for quite a while now and the day is not far when UGC will be ruling it.
Using UGC for your brand can be a great idea for you.The question here is, how to manage all the content?
And then managing and displaying them can also be a problem.Don’t worry we are here for your rescue.
We have got you some tools that will help you manage your UGC and get amazing results by using it for your brand.Here are the 5 best user-generated platforms1.
You can then choose the ones you think will be liked by your visitors.It also allows you to generate performance reports of your gallery and it’s AI-based system automatically displays the posts with high attraction.3.
CuralateCuralate is a visual commerce platform that helps you gather UGC and turn it to a shoppable storefront.It helps you gather content, gain rightful access, make it shoppable and display it on your website.
