Digigen & The TinMan

Thought: Facebook will float at the end of this year, as the social commerce area grows as brands establish how to sell through the social graph.

The social graph is what Facebook’s hopes and dreams are built upon, yet to date there aren’t hugely obvious examples of how the social graph dream is going to accelerate social commerce. Clearly, as a Head of Social Media, social commerce is something I am keen to get my brands to test, formulate learnings and grow. Yet, there are few businesses really genuinely thinking about the way to do this.

In order to make social media consistently valuable to clients it needs to deliver a genuine ROI and without social commerce it is difficult how to prove this. Syzygy have predicted that this will be the year that social commerce really grows up, if it does fantastic.. but I think we are, in alot of cases, along way off making this actually happen.

The right thinking is that we should be allowing and encouraging consumers to purchase where they engage, and engage where they purchase. e.g. feeding purchase information into a news feed, raising short-term alerts on product offers to followers.

How can brands get closer to this promised land of social commerce?

1) By shifting to DTC (Direct to Consumer). Wiggle.co.uk is one brand in the UK who I would say have done this really well. They consistently engage away from their site through both Twitter and Facebook profiles, driving short-term usage. Their site and company are set-up to adapt quickly to demands and thus followers feel they are getting a great one-2-one service. They do not have the strategy of waiting for consumers to come to them, but engage and drive purchase from within social channels.

2) By Switching from Cost Per Lead Models to Cost Per Acquisition. By switching to a CPA model, clients are immediately wanting a sale not a lead. The CPL model has worked well for social media due to the availability of the data. However, if clients using social media focus on CPA it will create a need to shorten the purchase process and thus deliver a purchase experience outside of their core site.

3) By Mapping their Social Graph and Purchase Habits. Understanding their consumers’ social media behaviours and the products they purchase will enable them to provide smaller scale solutions. Not all social audiences will want to purchase away from a core site, in fact, not all audiences are social, or confident socially. Therefore, studying who your most social audiences are… and how they purchase on your site will enable you to create smaller bespoke packages.

4) By trying a firesale. Try some really short-term offers on products you want to dispose off. End of season lines for example. Imagine ASOS delivering a Boxing Day sale only through its Facebook News Feeds or Twitter feeds…? Could be quite a magical and interesting thing, plus imagine this overlaid with an auction model… exciting times I think.

5) Invest in Web Analytics to survey what % of users are coming from social channels. My bet is that for alot of companies Facebook is becoming your 2nd digital volume driver behind Google. If this is the case, what are you waiting for?

Digigen Fix:

With anything social, the start up investment can be relatively small. A page and a newsfeed is really all you need to start consumers engaging with your social commerce platform. Of course it can get more complex, but its best to start small, test to see what works, then invest in rapid growth.