What is Social Commerce?

What is social commerce?

The term social commerce has been in the public eye for quite some time. Relatively speaking, these include sales through influencers, micro-influencers, and big key opinion leaders. But the most important thing is that the sale happens within the influencers’ audiences.

Social commerce is the ability to make a product purchase from a third-party company within the native social media experience. For example, you can browse and compare products on Facebook or Instagram and then make purchases there instead of going to the company’s site to buy.

Top Social Commerce Platforms in 2021 (and probably it will remain like that for a while):

• instagram

• facebook

• youtube

• snapchat

• tiktok

• pinterest

• twitter

• linkedin

• reddit

Some facts you might find useful

Today, the world population is 7.81 billion people, and worldwide social media users are 4.14 billion. Another interesting number is – that 60% of people say they discover new products on Instagram.

The COVID pandemic has influenced all spheres, fields, and parts of our lives. So, no wonder the pandemic came in handy for social commerce. It has accelerated the flow of shoppers from offline retail to online for the past five years. As a result, traffic in offline retail is falling rapidly, while global online sites have experienced an unprecedented increase.

In the first quarter of 2020, sales of classic offline retailers decreased by 25%. In the second quarter, the decline was up to 75%. Walmart’s online sales grew 97% in Q2 2020, and Target increased delivery sales by 273%.

Here are a few of the many reasons to think about adding social commerce to your repertoire if you have doubted its benefits:

• It increases the number of conversations taking place about your products and company

• It increases the markets for your products, reaching new customers you might not have considered

• It improves product discovery and awareness, personalizing the customer experience based on known preferences (social media sites have a lot of data, right)

J. Clement’s research lead with a focus on the internet and gaming in her article on Statista that states:

Retail platforms have undergone an unprecedented global traffic increase between January 2019 and June 2020, surpassing even holiday season traffic peaks. Overall, retail websites generated almost 22 billion visits in June 2020, up from 16.07 billion global visits in January 2020. This is of course due to the global coronavirus pandemic, which has forced millions of people to stay at home to stop the spread of the virus. Due to many shelter-at-home orders and a desire to avoid crowded stores in places where it is possible to shop, consumers have turned to the internet to procure everyday items such as groceries or toilet paper.

The most social commerce-using audience lives in China. Last year, live commerce and live streaming shopping there was estimated at $140 billion. By the way, live forms of selling products and services are on the top of popularity. It will continue to be at this level because the pandemic is still here, and even if it is gone, people seem to get more comfortable buying online.

So, are you intrigued by this way of finding customers? If so, we’ve found a few more articles for you to have a look at: here and here.

And do not forget there are millions of influencers to collaborate with on HypeTrain.