Social commerce is one of the hottest trends in social media today, and it looks to have an even greater impact in 2023.
What’s coming to social media in 2023?
It can be hard to predict the future, especially for something as fast-changing as social media. But if you look to today’s trends and the latest buzz, you’ll start to see the signs.
Social commerce is one of the hottest trends in social media today, and it looks to have an even bigger impact in 2023.
In this article, we set to find out the latest on what social commerce is, what it looks like, and how you can make the most of this buzzworthy new channel to further your brand and your business.
What is social commerce?
Social commerce is selling products directly within social media platforms.
This is different than social media marketing, where you might try to drive referral traffic from social media to a website or online store. With social commerce, the entire shopping experience happens without the customer ever leaving the social media site.
How does social commerce work?
There are a ton of benefits to this, as you might think. It’s a far more streamlined process, especially when you can enjoy things like automated chatbot checkouts, and autofill payments and delivery details. There are fewer clicks and taps with social commerce than with traditional e-commerce through a web store.
The efficiency of the social commerce purchase journey far outdoes the typical e-commerce purchase. There’s really great research performed by BigCommerce about this. Basically, the stats goes like this:
- If you have a traditional website and store, let’s say you get 10,000 visitors to the site.
- Of that group, 25% give you their email address
- When you send that group an email, 25% of them open it.
- Then 5% of those who open the email click on the link in the email.
- And three percent of those clicks end up buying something.
- That’s a grand total of 1 purchase, after starting with 10,000 visitors.
Now, compare that to a hypothetical social commerce journey. Let’s take a messenger chatbot for instance.
- Start with 10,000 chatbot visitors.
- Of that group, you can message 99% of them
- Open rates are quite high for chatbots, around 75%.
- So from the group that sees your message and opens it, let’s say that 48% click-through
- And then 1% purchase something.
That’s a total of 35 purchases, compared to the one (1) purchase in the website example.
Now, it obviously goes without saying that your mileage may vary here.
These are just example numbers. But hopefully they highlight some of the advantages of the ease and efficiency of social commerce.
There’s also a strong case to be made on the qualitative side of things. Research points out that there are really four separate stages of the shopping experience. These are:
- Convenience
- Shopping as play
- Shopping as exploration
- Shopping as entertainment
Today’s e-commerce channels mainly fulfil items 1 and 2, while 3 and 4 are more future-looking trends to build towards. Social commerce delivers on both of them much more readily than traditional e-commerce channels because it is a much more natural extension of existing consumer behaviour.
Speaking of existing consumer behaviour, it’s become widely known just how much consumers are shifting to social and mobile as primary means of content consumption and product discovery.
Here at Rebel Online, we offer numerous solutions with regard to social media management. Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can assist you in drafting your company’s next chapter of success.
