Shopping with Social Media

Every website owner strives to get a higher number of clicks on their website. Getting clicks means getting more interest, meaning more customers, and ultimately, more income. Achieving this is not that hard. The difficult part is making sure that those clicks (that usually come from casual visitors) become paying customers. In the online marketing field, one of the best tools available for any marketer is social media. Social media allows website owners to communicate with their users through other means.

In this podcast hosted by Bobby Hewitt – CEO and owner of Creative Thirst, he shows how Convert approaches the importance of social media in running an online business. Relatively speaking, social media is new to online marketing. We have always had social networking websites, but it wasn’t until the popularity explosion of social networking websites, such as Facebook, that it was considered to be a vital component when it comes to online advertising and marketing.

Shopping in a Social Platform

Bobby states that buying a product online has always been an isolated experience. The closest it has gotten to actual social shopping, so far at least, has been reading reviews of other people. But for the most part, marketers were satisfied with this. The collective knowledge gained from these platforms allowed us to get a better sense of the quality of the product, and Amazon made it easy for us by comparing the worst review and the best review side by side.

[Tweet “Social influences can double your conversion rates if they share your content on one of their social channels.”]

The way we look at social e-Commerce shopping is something that needs to be changed if we want to get higher conversion rates. The persuasive design of a website is a crucial element to achieve our goals. Websites should be perceived as a marketing tool that helps us sell our products and services. Social networking is a great way of establishing a relationship with customers and help them understand our brand. We know how family and friends can affect our decisions to buy something and how persuasive their advice can be. The same effect can be used in online social channels.

So, why sell on social media?

• You can easily share your products and services
• You can establish a good connection with your customers
• You can determine your customer’s expectations
• Your connections will create more connections for you

Social Connections

Before buying a certain product or using a service, we usually contact our closest people (friends and family) to ask them for their opinion. Thanks to the technology we have today, we are now able to communicate with our close people anytime. Most of the people think that the opinion of a trusted person is very important in making their decision. Friends have a huge influence and there is nothing we can do about it. It has always been that way and will probably continue in the future. This is called a social influence, and it plays a huge role in the whole buying process.

Social media has a huge impact on our online shopping. Most of you will probably agree that Facebook is the greatest social online buying tool. So much that we are considered to be the social shopping generation. According to an article by Deanna Di Marco,

Social media shopping is on the rise and has the capacity to eventually become the new face of e-commerce. Social platform, Facebook, currently dominates SM commerce with Twitter and Pinterest following behind. This new type of commerce has untapped major potential and gives retailers the opportunity to connect with their customers on and totally new level.

What really matters in social media shopping is the right strategy. For visitors, there is nothing easier than using a simple product search feature to find the product they’ve been looking. Instead of wasting your time going from a store to store, you can now visit multiple stores in just a couple of minutes. This is the world we are living in and it keeps evolving from day to day. But the question is: Are we evolving with it too? If you want learn more about this, you can visit us at Convert.