E-commerce is translated into Italian as “electronic commerce,” meaning the sale and purchase of products through the Internet. As you can imagine, the strategy behind such a plan is really impressive and needs to be considered in all details.
A consulting for e-commerce real, starts with the analysis of the market, competitors, knowing what tools are available to us to be able to get to sell our product and know the market.
That said, we can definitely say that an important part of this strategy is played precisely by the social networks. Why is this? Just think about what we do whenever we want to buy a product: we ask our friends for advice, so what could be better than using social networks? In fact, people tend to consider more valid behaviors or choices that are made by a large number of people. This is precisely why it is necessary to first have a good “fan base” before starting a campaign aimed at direct selling from social. The combination of the online and social worlds represents Social Commerce, which stands for the importance of social networks throughout the product buying process. In fact, it goes from the initial information about the product, to the purchase itself, all the way to post-sale. At this point, one could begin to define an initial subdivision between F-commerce, i.e., using Facebook for sales and sharing information and support with Twitter. The function of social networks within an ecommerce business kicks off before the start of the business, this is because social can help with both idea research and competitor analysis, perhaps aided by some tools. An example of searching for ideas via social networks could be the Facebbok group “Digital Indigenous” which has almost 10000 members. But it is not only a reason for idea research. With social networks we can also do some market research to try to understand what the habits and needs of users are, never forgetting that people are not on social networks to buy something, or rather, they are not in the first place. However, Facebook Insights can help us with their demographic data that categorizes those who are fans of our page, dividing them by gender, age groups and location. Another important step would be to identify industry influencers. In this regard, a tool such as Followerwonk, which has search by Bios and by themes linked to Twitter, could come to our aid. Before figuring out how to convert fans customers we need to emphasize the real purpose of social networks in an e-commerce strategy. In fact, as shown in this very recent research conducted in the United States: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Marketers-Find-Success-on-Social-Through-Customer-Engagement/1010422, the primary purpose of social networks is to raise brand brand awareness, while selling products is only placed second to last.
That said, let’s see how we can best use the Facebook platform for our e-commerce.
- To make our products known, as if we had a “storefront” at our disposal. And what better showcase than a dedicated Facebook tab to display our price list? Logically, it will have to be well divided and should be something interactive and graphically well laid out. This will serve us to give visibility to the products, be a greater incentive to become a fan of the page, useful for word of mouth and also easy to implement in case we want to give coupons to fans. The cons are: the difficulty of reaching fans, you give a strong steering to the user experience on Facebook, a strong address to the page itself.
- In addition to using Facebook as a storefront, one could very well exploit the social platform as an actual store. As indeed do Lady Gaga or Disney selling tickets directly from Facebook. Another example is Kembrel, which becomes a store only for limited periods of time, say 5 days, and does so by targeting only fans with discounts of up to 60 percent. The pros of this tactic are: excellent visibility to products, high word of mouth, fans stay connected, incentive to become fans. The cons: difficult to implement especially for small brands, goals difficult to achieve.
- Another way is to integrate Facebook with the site. However, this is very difficult considering that a high percentage of online purchases fail due to mandatory registration, for example, with a social plugin. It would be useful to get around this problem by using an app that with one click allows different actions, such as allowing my friends to see what I have purchased. In that case this will be one of the pros, along with high social proof and word of mouth. Again, the con is the difficult implementation.
That said, we must consider that one possible new feature that may come to the aid of those doing F-Commerce are Facebook’s “Collections” and the Want button.
But with Facebook we certainly cannot forget the opportunity for advertising. Different might be the strategies, but the first advice is to experiment. Try different ads campaigns interweaving them together and monitoring them, until you find the right one, the key to the sale. The budget logically varies depending on what we have to sell, but in a first phase even 10€ per day may be enough. We will have to start with an initial phase of building the fan base, understanding fans not as ends in themselves, but as the beginning of a path that will make them become loyal and attached to our brand. We are going to consider Micro-targeting and the cost per like will be as low as possible. At this stage we cannot afford to be in a hurry, but we need to curate and get familiarity with the user.
The second phase could include as a goal to bring traffic to the shop with three possible ways to go: direct ads to the site, ads to tab and from there to the site, sponsored news. The third phase, on the other hand, will be the crucial one, which is when our fans need to be brought to interact. To succeed in this, one can use promoted posts with sponsored news related to likes, comments and interactions on the posts themselves. A campaign that always relaunches the last post automatically can also be used for a period. The last phase is the one that could lead us to get some sales and therefore it must be aimed only at the fans that we have now retained thanks to the previous 3 phases. To do this we could use a mailing list sign-up Tab and a coupon valid as a discount.
At this point we always have to monitor our campaigns and you could very well use Power Editor, as it is a tool that provides a detailed report divided by listings of each campaign. But monitoring should also be done by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These for social media are of 2 types:
- Interaction rate: the number of people talking about a topic, thus the likes, comments, shares, event attendance, and bid requests on Facebook. But not only that! Also the number of tweets, ReTweets, additions to favorites and lists on Twitter. And the same goes for other social.
- Response time: the ratio of first response time to the customer to the total number of requests.
But the fundamental reason why an e-commerce must include a social strategy is to build a community. This is to create a dialogue with users and be able to share content. It then starts with support and brand outreach, and then moves on to sales as well.
