How (and why) to implement social commerce

Dur­ing the long and anx­ious months of the first nation­al lock­down, use of social media in the UK soared. Peo­ple col­lec­tive­ly logged on to online net­works as a way to com­mu­ni­cate, con­nect with the out­side world or find tem­po­rary dis­trac­tion. But also, to shop.

Accord­ing to research by Parcel­Hero, a fifth of all con­sumers indulged in social com­merce dur­ing the ini­tial lock­down. And by the end of 2020, it is pre­dict­ed near­ly 11 mil­lion UK shop­pers will have dis­cov­ered a prod­uct on social media, an increase of 95 per cent com­pared to 2017.

For these con­sumers, shop­ping via the likes of Face­book, Insta­gram and YouTube inject­ed joy back into the shop­ping expe­ri­ence, says Julie Ather­ton, con­sul­tant, strate­gist and author of Social Media Strat­e­gy.

“What we’ve seen dur­ing the pan­dem­ic is peo­ple of all gen­er­a­tions embrac­ing social media in its truest sense, using it to bring them­selves clos­er togeth­er. What social com­merce does is allow you to shop with oth­ers too and bring back some of that expe­ri­ence of brows­ing a phys­i­cal store with a friend. It puts plea­sure into ecom­merce.”

It isn’t only the shop­pers them­selves who stand to ben­e­fit either. For the plat­forms, it keeps users safe­ly con­tained with­in “the walled gar­den” of their net­work, with­out ever being direct­ed to a third-par­ty site.

And for brands and retail­ers, it access­es the 96 per cent of UK con­sumers who fre­quent social media chan­nels at least once a month, with the aver­age user log­ging on for two hours every sin­gle day.

“You can see why there’s an impe­tus from all of us to get involved, whether we’re a con­sumer, the brand or the plat­form,” says Ather­ton.

That said, for brands and retail­ers keen to take advan­tage, it’s best not to sim­ply jump straight in with­out some prepara­to­ry steps, advis­es Jake Knowles, senior retail con­sul­tant at BJSS. “Yes, it’s a strong option, the num­bers speak for them­selves, but div­ing feet first into Tik­Tok just because it’s all over the head­lines isn’t the way.”

How to design a social commerce strategy for your business 

Start by get­ting clar­i­ty on what you’re look­ing to achieve. Is it to use social media as a plat­form for dis­cov­ery? To pull engage­ment away from rival brands? Or sim­ply to con­vert more clicks to sales? “Then com­pare that strat­e­gy to what the dif­fer­ent plat­forms can offer and take a more strate­gic, con­sid­ered approach,” says Knowles.

Con­duct a lit­tle data analy­sis too, BJSS head of indus­tries David Gore adds, to estab­lish exact­ly who your core demo­graph­ic is, which plat­forms they tend to fre­quent and how they cur­rent­ly use the dif­fer­ent chan­nels.

With this insight, brands and retail­ers can then start to think about which plat­forms are the right fit. Don’t spread your­self too thin across all the options either, but opt to “excel on a cou­ple”, says Tama­ra Lit­tle­ton, chief exec­u­tive of The Social Ele­ment.

Cur­rent­ly, Insta­gram remains the most pop­u­lar choice in the UK. Accord­ing to a 2019 Stack­la report, it’s the pre­ferred plat­form with 92 per cent of retail­ers, a pref­er­ence Lit­tle­ton says she sees reflect­ed across her own clients. In large part that’s thanks to the intro­duc­tion of its Insta­gram Check­out func­tion in 2019, which allows users to find, pur­chase and pay for a prod­uct, all with­out leav­ing the app.

Yes, [social com­merce] is a strong option, but div­ing feet first into Tik­Tok because it’s all over the head­lines isn’t the way

“That has been a game-chang­er,” she says, paving the way for “incred­i­bly quick” trans­ac­tions, which caters to those brands that rely on impulse pur­chas­es. To access the tool and offer pur­chase options both on their feed and Insta­gram sto­ries, brands and retail­ers need only set up an approved com­merce account.

Then there is Face­book. The most estab­lished, and arguably most straight­for­ward, of the plat­forms, in May it made social com­merce even sim­pler with the intro­duc­tion of Face­book Shops. The free tool enables any sized busi­ness to dis­play, cus­tomise and sell direct to con­sumers with a min­i­mal invest­ment of resources or exper­tise. “It’s a great shop win­dow,” says Lit­tle­ton though, unlike Insta­gram, the UK plat­form still fun­nels users to com­plete a pur­chase on a business’s own ecom­merce site.

For larg­er brands and retail­ers, YouTube can also pro­vide a com­pelling way to reach poten­tial con­sumers, she adds. Approved plat­forms with 10,000-plus sub­scribers, unless they are tar­get­ed at chil­dren, will auto­mat­i­cal­ly be enti­tled to a “merch shelf”. This sits under­neath their video con­tent and allows them to show­case up to 12 prod­ucts for pur­chase.

Not to for­get gam­ing plat­form Twitch, owned by Ama­zon and inte­grat­ed with its appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­face, or API, which means brands don’t need their own ecom­merce plat­form to take advan­tage. The plat­form allows users to shop straight from video broad­casts, allow­ing com­pa­nies to drag and drop wid­gets beneath.

Tik­Tok too, though rel­a­tive­ly new among plat­forms, “can be a won­der­ful place to tell sto­ries about your prod­uct”, says Lit­tle­ton.

Plus, in Octo­ber, the plat­form announced its part­ner­ship with Shopi­fy, paving the way for social com­merce. “That makes it one to watch,” adds Lit­tle­ton.

Creating a compelling shopping experience on social media platforms

Whichev­er plat­form a brand or retail­er opts for, they’ll then need to think care­ful­ly about how to tran­si­tion their exist­ing ecom­merce offer onto social media.

Chloe Cox, social media lead at Wun­der­man Thomp­son Com­merce, rec­om­mends brands and retail­ers estab­lish them­selves first on the plat­form via tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing con­tent, to “cap­ture con­sumers before you start to adver­tise”. And, once you do start to sell, use a diverse mix of con­tent that moves between shots of prod­ucts, to part­ner­ships with influ­encers and shop­pable posts. 

Pri­ori­tise edu­ca­tion­al con­tent that sign­posts con­sumers on why and how to shop via social too, says Gore at BJSS. In addi­tion, ensure those man­ag­ing these accounts are well equipped for a shift to com­merce, by pro­vid­ing “employ­ees and influ­encers with toolk­its that enable them to have the rel­e­vant tech­ni­cal skills, such as how to engage audi­ences through live streams”.

Remem­ber, it’s about bal­anc­ing the short-term gains, with longer-term brand loy­al­ty, he adds, so inte­grate pro­mo­tions and wider mar­ket­ing cam­paigns on the plat­form “to embed this as a per­ma­nent con­tent chan­nel”. After all, all the signs are that social com­merce will be a per­ma­nent fix­ture in retail going for­ward. Even with­out a glob­al pan­dem­ic, there’s lit­tle doubt it was set to enter the main­stream. And now that’s like­ly to hap­pen years ear­li­er. For brands and retail­ers, this cre­ates a new urgency. They’ll need to learn fast or face being left on the merch shelf.

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Can China teach the UK how to master social commerce?

On Novem­ber 11, Chi­na cel­e­brat­ed Sin­gles Day. What began in the nineties as a day when unmar­ried peo­ple would cel­e­brate their sin­gle sta­tus by treat­ing them­selves to a few small gifts is now the biggest online shop­ping fes­ti­val in the world. 2020 was no excep­tion, with $100 bil­lion spent over 11 days when Chi­nese shop­pers snapped up deals on food, fash­ion, fur­ni­ture and even real estate. 

That’s in no small part thanks to the explo­sion in social com­merce in Chi­na. Sales via social are expect­ed to bring in $240 bil­lion to the country’s brands and retail­ers this year, an increase of a third in just one year, with 30.6 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion pur­chas­ing a prod­uct via a social media plat­form, com­pared to only 16 per cent in the UK.

For the Sin­gles Day sales, Chi­nese con­sumers were treat­ed to thou­sands upon thou­sands of live shop­ping streams by brands, cou­pled with celebri­ty appear­ances, give­aways and dis­counts on Wei­bo, Ren­ren and WeChat.

This tur­bocharged adop­tion of social com­merce is part­ly due to China’s rel­a­tive­ly new mid­dle class, for whom retail first took shape against a back­ground of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, says Young Pham, chief strat­e­gy offi­cer at dig­i­tal con­sult­ing firm CI&T. Part­ly too, it’s China’s dense, urbanised pop­u­la­tion. The country’s major metrop­o­lis­es, such as Shang­hai and Bei­jing, pro­vide plat­forms the chance to reach up to 50 mil­lion peo­ple in a 30 or 40-mile radius, who are there­fore easy to ship and deliv­er to.

What­ev­er the dri­vers though, it’s clear the UK can learn plen­ty from China’s exam­ple. Take the “pomp and cir­cum­stance” that sur­rounds Sin­gles Day, says Pham. “That expe­ri­ence ele­ment has been crit­i­cal to suc­cess in Chi­na.” Brands and retail­ers in the UK should take note and ensure social com­merce is as much expe­ri­en­tial as trans­ac­tion­al, he rec­om­mends. Be that beau­ty brands pro­vid­ing online con­sul­ta­tions or fash­ion retail­ers work­ing with celebri­ty ambas­sadors to show­case new lines.

Stay one step ahead by learn­ing from emerg­ing trends in Chi­na too, adds Jake Knowles of BJSS. That includes both live streams, but also peer-to-peer shop­ping, where plat­forms facil­i­tate shop­pers “social­is­ing” in pairs or groups as they pur­chase. One Chi­nese plat­form, Pin­duo­duo, actu­al­ly low­ers its prices, the more con­sumers are brows­ing prod­ucts togeth­er.

Don’t ignore the impact of China’s ful­fil­ment capa­bil­i­ties either, adds Knowles, and the capac­i­ty for ecom­merce oper­a­tors such as Aliba­ba to dis­trib­ute wide­ly across a huge geo­graph­i­cal area. “Yes you need the glitz and glam, but you have to have the infra­struc­ture in place as well.”

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