What Is Social Shopping and How It Promotes e-Commerce Brands

Social Shopping, A New Norm

Many aspects of our lives have been changed by social media. There’s no doubt that it has severely affected the world of shopping. The combination of social media and e-commerce is social shopping.

Social shopping includes sites like Groupon, LivingSocial, Poshmark, Etsy, Envato, and OpenSky these are few names where people are encouraged to purchase as a group to save money.

Power of e-commerce community

These platforms consist of communities in which shoppers and influencers share, discuss, and curate the types of items/services available. For eg: Best Valentines Gift Ideas. Shoppers ask questions about products, take opinions of others, and make purchase decisions. These communities create an ideal marketplace for shoppers, so they can compare prices, bring friends along, and make purchases with the click of a button,  all without stepping foot in a store.

However, social e-commerce wouldn’t have been possible without the help of social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Where the shopper makes a purchase, and immediately share the link of that purchase via social media.

Modernized word-of-mouth marketing

Sharing about a purchase on a social site immediately connects shoppers to their social networks, making a large impact potentially for the retailer. This is the strategy for modern day ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing.

Some shopping social sites also offer referral incentives for the current customer, which makes the sharing strategy even more appealing.

What marketers can do to be involved

Social shopping is a great advantage for shoppers, but what’s in for the brands themselves? With the right message, social shoppers can become a lucrative audience for marketers.

Use a CTA (Call to action)

The most popular form of promoting brands on social e-commerce sites is by applying a “buy now” button for a paid social strategy, through this consumers get directly from window shopping to purchase in seconds.

Engaging User Generated Content will gain influencer

The idea of using UGC to sell products is a recent phenomenon. Creating a gallery with photos of actual customers using your products is a relative example of UGC and all of these products features clickable links in order to purchase the product anonymously.

Keep display ads

Purchase display ads on third-party social shopping sites, that’s a straightforward technique to get involved with social shopping, and these sites have only a specific purpose that is to make people shop. Therefore, brand representation on these sites is an excellent way to attract the audience, likely to be making a purchase soon.

Running social ads

Another approach is to buy ads directly on the social platforms to display ads directly on shopping sites, whether an Instagram ad or Facebook sponsored content, such platforms provide target ads to help you get in front of the targeted audience.