[24]7 Social makes social sharing easy for customers and drives engagement, conversions and revenue for enterprises.

1. Getting True ROI
from Social
[24]7 Social makes social sharing easy for customers and
drives engagement, conversions and revenue for enterprises

2. Social Sharing: Creating a Network Effect
For years companies have used social media sharing (social sharing) to help build brand
awareness and drive sales. But many of these social initiatives proved challenging as the tools
and applications needed to manage and engage customers, and track ROI, lacked
sophistication.
With the right strategy, tools and applications, social sharing will enhance your customer’s
experience while providing a true ROI based on sales conversions. Social sharing – leveraging
your customers’ social networks to promote your products and promotions – turns your
brand advocates into a direct sales force online.
Social sharing, when done right, represents a huge opportunity.
Today’s consumers are actively researching, recommending and
sharing information about products and promotions using Facebook,
Twitter, Google, Pinterest, email and other social networks. Many
social media-oriented customers are eager to share information about
the experiences they have with your business. Forward-looking
companies are taking advantage of this by investing in social
applications that encourage their brand advocates to share by
actively promoting and recommending their products through social
networks.
Social sharing is now mainstreami:
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
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15% of online shoppers ‘share’ their purchases
40% read product and brand postings by friends
5% click through and purchase.
More and more, your customers expect a great social experience – one that is relevant,
contextual and easy – to be a core part of their relationship with your brand. Done well, social
sharing will help you engage your brand advocates in the right social interaction at the right time.
In this interview, [24]7’s Vice President of Product Marketing, Brooks Crichlow and Aditya
Kothadiya, Director of Product Management for Social at [24]7, discuss the evolving role of social
media and how social sharing applications can help an enterprise tap its network of loyal,
enthusiastic customers to increase referrals, conversions, and incremental sales.
Q: How can companies use social media to engage their
brand advocates more effectively?
Brooks: Social media is today’s word-of-mouth advertising but
at a massive scale. But, for social to be most effective, you
need to engage with your customers while they’re engaging
with you. A great social experience is relevant, contextual and
low effort for the user. If a customer’s on your site now and
excited about a product or a promotion, you want to enable
Brooks Crichlow
© 2013 by 24/7 Customer, Inc. All rights reserved

3. them to share their experience right away, without leaving your site. You need to make it feel
easy, like a natural next step.
Q: How does social fit in with an omnichannel experience?
Brooks: Strong brands find ways to engage their customers in relevant ways across multiple
touch points. That’s a lot easier if you can transform social sharing from a web-only interaction to
an omnichannel experience. You want social engagement to flow seamlessly across your
website, social sites, mobile app, your voice and chat channels, email campaigns and even instore programs. Social sharing becomes part of an omnichannel experience when you enable
your customers to share in a contextual way from the self-service or agent-assisted channel that
they’re using at that moment.
Q: What are the benefits of social sharing for engaging brand advocates?
Aditya: Enabling the social experience lets the customer
become your brand advocate and leverage their social
networks. Through social sharing they can promote a company’s
brand, its products and special offers such as discounts or
incentive programs.
Through social referrals, businesses can increase conversions,
Aditya Kothadiya
reduce cart abandonment and improve revenues. For example,
if someone’s hesitating to conclude a purchase, they might
check with friends on Facebook for information and get feedback that leads them to make the
purchase. You want to enable them to do this while they’re on your site.
The numbers are substantial. For example, for every 100,000 online transactions a business
has, if 15% of those customers share their purchase, that’s 15,000 shares. If 40 people view
each share, that’s 600,000 people who see the shared
posts or tweets. Let’s say 5% of those people click
through, that’s 30,000 referred visitors to your ecommerce
site. If 5% percent buy, that’s 1,500 incremental
purchases. Because you’re leveraging social networks,
the scale is immense.
Q: Are there different types of social sharing?
Aditya: Absolutely. You can share a purchase,
information about a product you’re considering,
promotions or even about your customer service
experience.
Purchases can be easily shared on social
Q: What’s an example of “purchase sharing” and how
media such as Facebook without having
the customer leave your site.
does it work?
Aditya: Purchase sharing is sharing information about
what you just bought right after check out is complete. For example, let’s say you just got a great
deal online on a flat screen TV. Social sharing enables you to quickly post information about that
product and your experience immediately on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, via email or your
© 2013 by 24/7 Customer, Inc. All rights reserved

4. preferred social network. For example, you could share “look at this great TV I just bought on
sale at acme.com”.
Purchase sharing also provides a link to the product on the retailer’s website which can lead to
additional sales when people click on that link. So there’s significant potential upside for retailers.
They can seize the post-purchase moment by inviting the customer to share without forcing them
to leave the company’s site.
Q: How do social sharing incentives work?
Aditya: You can decide whether to offer an incentive, like a discount or a special offer, to
encourage customers to share on Facebook, Twitter or their preferred social network. For
example, you can offer someone a discount on their next purchase when one of their friends
makes a purchase. You can offer the same incentive to
the customer’s friends for their next purchase.
Q: Do you need to offer an incentive to get people
to share?
Aditya: Surprisingly no, you don’t have to offer an
incentive to be successful. One of the cool things about
social is that people are often self-motivated to share
just because they like sharing. Offering an incentive can
be a cost-effective way to get personalized advertising.
You can try different approaches, with and without an
incentive, and optimize them based on how they
perform.
Social sharing incentives provide your
Q: That brings up a good question, how do you
customers with the ability to promote
manage and measure the performance of these
your offerings to their social networks
programs?
without ever leaving your website.
Brooks: Social sharing is very measureable. You know
how many people were invited to share, how many
shared, how many click through and how many buy. Analytics and reporting make it easy to see
the impact and gauge the ROI.
It’s also easy to do A/B testing so you can determine which offers, messaging and designs work
best and adjust accordingly. Marketing can manage it without leaning on IT. They can adjust
offers, messaging, look and feel and the branding to quickly measure performance and continue
to tune social sharing programs and find what works best.
Q: How is [24]7 addressing social media and the customer experience?
Brooks: We recently introduced [24]7 Social to enable retailers to promote their brands online
and increase sales through social sharing. [24]7 Social measures the ROI of social marketing
initiatives with comprehensive analytics. It includes plugins that enable consumers to share
information about their purchases, your promotions, products they’re evaluating and their overall
service experience. Customers can do this in context without leaving the site so that the
© 2013 by 24/7 Customer, Inc. All rights reserved

5. experience is relevant and easy. It makes social sharing simple and fun. It’s easy to implement
and customize and includes a comprehensive reporting system.
Q: How do big data and predictive analytics play in Social?
Brooks: [24]7 Social runs on [24]7’s big data, predictive analytics, and real-time decisioning
platform. We can score people’s propensity to share and then invite the most appropriate people,
so you’re not spamming those that aren’t likely to share. Leveraging big data and prediction
makes social sharing more successful. It makes it intelligent and a natural extension of the
broader customer experience.
Q: What’s the most exciting thing about social sharing?
Aditya: The fact that it’s a win-win. With a well-designed social engagement application, people
enjoy using it and can become passionate about it. For businesses, it provides an incentive to
deliver a quality customer experience. Social sharing, at its best, drives conversations,
conversions and revenue.
To learn more about [24]7 Social, please click here. To send us an email, please click here.
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© 2013 by 24/7 Customer, Inc. All rights reserved