Social media has played a pivotal role in the digital marketing landscape. It has allowed businesses to scale their efforts in acquiring, retaining, and ultimately upselling customers. Social media has helped businesses in improving their presence on the internet, generating leads, and increasing the online traffic to their website. One of the more interesting use cases of social media has been in the eCommerce industry.
Owing to its commercial success, many eCommerce businesses have included social media in their marketing plans. A well planned and executed social media campaign can help eCommerce businesses achieve their desired business goals.
In this infographic, we’ll explore more about the importance of social media in the eCommerce industry.
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Social media has removed the limits to how we shop. Now we don’t have to browse through entire isles of retail stores to find what we want, we don’t even have to browse through thousands of options on eCommerce websites to choose what we want. You can just buy something from within Facebook and Instagram without ever having to leave the application. This integration of social media and eCommerce platforms has made this happen.
Monthly Active Users On Social Media
The first thing that any business looks at is the sheer size of the market. All the social media platforms combined boast a userbase of almost 3 billion people. This alone is probably the biggest factor that can influence eCommerce businesses to jump on the social media bandwagon.
Monthly active users give an idea as to what is the volume of people that actively engage with the platform. This is very crucial to understand as this relates very closely to your business goals. The higher the engagement amongst the users, the higher will be the chances that they indulge themselves in the online shopping experience that you want to provide them with.
Different platforms have different numbers of monthly active users. Depending on your strategy, you can choose the platform that suits your needs.
- Facebook: 2.37 billion
- WhatsApp: 1.6 billion
- Instagram: 1 billion
- TikTok: 500 million
- Reddit: 330 million
- Twitter: 330 million
Time Spent On Social Platforms
This again is a very crucial aspect to look at. Time spent on social platforms reflects how people interact with the platform. It shows the activities on which the people spend their time on the platform. This time that people spend on different social platforms could give you an idea about the kind of ads you should run and the frequency of the ads.
Another interesting aspect to watch out here is the actual time at which the target audience is active. Coupled with the duration, having an insight about the times at which the audience is active on a social platform gives you the opportunity to craft the right message and deliver it at the right moment to the right people.
Depending on the demographics and the basic USP of the platform, people spend different amounts of time on a platform:
- An average person spends 6 years and 8 months on social media in their lifetime
- Facebook: 58 minutes/day
- Instagram: 53 minutes/day
- WhatsApp: 28 minutes/day
- Snapchat: 49 minutes/day
- Twitter:1 minute/day
- LinkedIn: 1 minute/day
Demographics Of Social Commerce Shoppers
Understanding demographics is an important part of marketing. In the case of social media, it becomes even more important because the decision-making time is considerably smaller as compared to actual shopping. Age and gender make up the majority of the demographic characteristics and are responsible for influencing the buying decisions.
Using the insights or the analytics available in social platforms, you can get a good idea as to what kind of audience is present on your eCommerce social media page. You can couple that with the advertising potential that each platform provides, you can create campaigns that can effectively target customers and drive a better conversion rate, all on the basis of the knowledge about the demographics.
Social commerce has the following demographic:
- Female: 36%
- Male: 64%
- Age:
- 18-34: 42%
- 35-54: 32%
- 55+: 15%
How Does Social Media Influence eCommerce
Social media has had its influence almost everywhere. Because of this, it’s important to realize the importance of social media in your business and understand its impact. The eCommerce industry has actually been revolutionized by social media.
On social media, people like to share about their lives and this presents a huge opportunity for eCommerce businesses. People share product reviews, their shopping experience, and they even look for what to buy on social media. All of this provides an opportunity for businesses to leverage. Using all of this information, they can create a positive word of mouth about their brand which will help them drive their sales.
Social media influences the purchasing decisions of customers and the following statistics shed some light on the extent of influence that social media has:
- 87% of eCommerce shoppers depend on social media to choose what they want to buy
- 50% of online shoppers state discounts as the reason for following brands on social media
- 40% of merchants generate sales using social media
- 71% of online shoppers will use social media to recommend their favorite brands
Why Do People Follow Brands On Social Media
Apart from their friends and close acquaintances, people do actually follow brands on social media. eCommerce brands promote their core values or USP, so to say, on social media. The customers that find the message appealing, connect with the brand, and interact with the content that they put out on social media.
There is a myriad of reasons as to how people interact with brands on social media. Social media has provided a lot of opportunities for eCommerce businesses to interpret itself as a means to do different things. Apart from buying products, customers indulge in a lot of ways to interact with eCommerce business content.
These are some of the more prominent reasons why people like to follow brands:
- Discounts and Promotions
- Staying up to date with the product information
- Customer Service
- To provide feedback
- Entertaining content
Trends In Social Commerce
Over the years, social media has brought about considerable changes in the way how eCommerce has approached selling. This has brought about patterns that can be observed in the buying behavior and can be capitalized on by the eCommerce businesses.
These patterns or trends like which social platforms consumers prefer for buying, what kind of content do they like to interact with, or how much business does social media actually generate can help eCommerce businesses generate the right kind of insights and make proper business decisions.
- 33% of US consumers have used social media to purchase products
- 1 in 4 business owners are using Facebook to sell their products
- In 2019, 83% of Instagramers discovered new products using that platform
- In 2019, for products bought through social media, the average order value was $79
Average Order Value For Different Platforms
ROI is an important thing to consider for eCommerce businesses before investing in anything. It’s crucial to know what a platform offers before going all-in with the investment. Every social platform has something to offer and that something can be expressed in monetary terms as the order value.
Depending on the kind of audience that flocks around a social platform, there is a different monetary value that can be assigned to them.
- Instagram: $65
- Facebook: $55
- Pinterest: $50
- Twitter: $46.29
- LinkedIn: $44.2
Best Practices For Social Commerce
Every social platform has its quirks and your eCommerce business might need to adjust to all of this but at the end of the day, there are certain best practices that are supposed to be followed. These best practices allow establishing certain parities that customers expect to see. Based on that, a social media strategy can be built.
Based on a lot of similarities among campaigns run by eCommerce businesses, these are some of the common best practices for social commerce:
- Running promotions
- Focusing on your best, lowest-cost products
- Harnessing influencer marketing
- Creating shoppable content
- Encourage User-Generated Content
- Creating more video content
In conclusion, social media plays a huge role in the eCommerce business. Whether it is integrating with the eCommerce platforms or promoting the word of mouth, social media has proved to be quite an essential part of the eCommerce business and will continue to do so for the upcoming future.
