It used to take a lot more work—and a lot of luck—to sell items on social media. You’d put out a link to your site and hope that people would click it, browse around, decide to buy anything, and then complete the transaction.
The most popular social networking sites have all made it possible to shop for things they feature on their sites without leaving them in recent years.
What does social commerce apart from social selling
There are two stages to making a sale on social media, much like any other platform:
Getting potential clients interested in your business and its products through social media (a practice commonly known as “social selling”).
If you want to turn that curiosity and involvement into actual purchases, you need to make the purchase process as easy as possible for your customers. (known as social commerce).
Both are crucial, but they call for distinct methods. Let’s check it out.
Social selling
In social selling, rather than simply pitching products or services to users, the emphasis is on establishing and nurturing genuine connections with prospective buyers and those who can sway their purchasing decisions.
Here’s an example of what social selling could look like in practice:
- Maintaining vigil for potential clients’ interactions and responding to their feedback
- Activating post alerts for key opinion leaders allows for more direct interaction with these figures and their followers.
- Using social media to showcase your knowledge, personality, and ideals in hopes of attracting a following of highly-targeted consumers.
- Sending prospective clients personal letters to introduce yourself and start a conversation in which you provide value rather than a hard sell
Exactly what does “social commerce” entail?
What we call “social commerce” is the practice of using social networking sites to facilitate direct sales by streamlining some (or all) aspects of the traditional online shopping experience.
For a more interactive and social shopping experience, social commerce links together:
- Including product details on content where they will generate the most interest.
- Consumers may get a sense of how other people feel about a product or brand by reading comments and likes in addition to reviews before making a quick, informed purchase.
- allowing influencers to sell your wares on their websites
- Increasing the product’s shareability by including it into shoppable content Saving shopping information, such as the customer’s email, payment card number, and delivery address, to reduce the time between browsing and buying
Best four social networking sites for online shopping
Not all social media sites are made equal for social commerce. Some social media platforms are better for e-commerce than others, either because they’ve put more resources into social commerce features or because you can more easily reach your target market there.
The good news is that Shopify can be integrated with the vast majority of the most prominent social networks, allowing you to sell your wares in several locations with a single set of data.
Depending on your industry and target audience, the top social media networks for e-commerce nowadays may fall anywhere from (in order):
- TikTok
TikTok
TikTok’s easy-to-use video creation tools and distinctive blend of authenticity, education, and fun have propelled the short-form video app to meteoric popularity, putting it on course to become the third largest social network.
You’ll also be able to take advantage of TikTok’s collaboration with Shopify to sell your wares on the platform’s burgeoning social commerce platform.
Using TikTok Shopping, you may gain access to a variety of tools designed to help you make sales.
TikTok Shopping is an e-commerce platform that allows users to sell their wares on their profiles and in their videos, much like Facebook and Instagram. If you see a TikTok profile that features a shopping bag icon, touching it will show you any products that the user has tagged in their videos.
Gymshark and other e-commerce firms have spent the previous few years building a sizable TikTok audience by creating engaging content, and now that audience may be converted into buyers thanks to TikTok Shopping. Now, fans may learn about new products either in the Shop part of their profile or in the context of certain pieces of content.
Participate in LIVE Sales on TikTok and Excite Your Followers
Instead of watching boring TV infomercials, you can use TikTok’s live streaming capability (called TikTok LIVE) to interact with an audience in real time while also promoting and selling things to them.
With a simple swipe, viewers may switch between the content and the product collection, making this a fantastic tool for demonstrating multiple products inside a single video.
Use product links to draw attention to specific products within your TikTok videos.
TikTok’s product links allow you to highlight your products in vertical video content, much as Instagram Stories’ product tagging. This facilitates the promotion of items available in your TikTok store in videos when external links are disabled.
Benefit from the recent surge in product-focused TikTok commercials
At one point, TikTok Ads were the only option for businesses looking to monetize their presence on the app. TikTok advertisements have also been improved with the introduction of the aforementioned shopping capabilities.
To facilitate social commerce on the platform, TikTok has began rolling out new ad formats that are product-friendly:
- Advertisements interspersed with ordinary TikToks in your feed are called in-feed advertisements.
- When you first launch the TikTok app, you’ll be bombarded by TopView advertising.
- With collection advertisements, customers may shop a full assortment without leaving the app.
- Based on a user’s actions within the platform, Dynamic Showcase Ads (DSAs) will display relevant items and creative.
- Collection Ad on TikTok highlighting the seamless shopping experience amongst featured products.