Now more than ever, brands are focusing on using social media as a place to grow transactions and customer service experiences. That focus has resulted in almost two-thirds of brands incorporating shoppable content and social commerce into their overall marketing strategies, according to a recent survey by Gartner.
With Gen Z’ers and millennials so heavily influenced by social media when it comes to making purchases, it’s no surprise that an ecommerce business stands to benefit greatly from leveraging shoppable content. We are already seeing 41% and 17% of brands make use of the shoppable content features introduced by Instagram and Facebook respectively, and more than half of brands surveyed have stated that they’ve adopted the Facebook “Shop Now” button as well. As a whole, Instagram has proven to be the leader with its shoppable post types, with both brands and consumers increasing their usage with the popular image-sharing platform.
While Twitter has some catching up to do in terms of generating social commerce revenue, the platform has done very well with its ability to manage customer service. Over 70% of the brands who were surveyed claim they rely on it to monitor customer conversions and address complaints, which is an uptick from the 66% who made the same statement last year.
Social commerce as a whole is positioned for growth as both brands and shoppers begin to see more value in shoppable content and as the social networks roll out more advanced features to support more transactions taking place. Going forward, it’s clear that social commerce is here to stay, but while it may seem exciting for ecommerce companies to jump right in and enable shoppable content everywhere, taking the time to develop a social commerce strategy will always prove more effective.
