A presentation delivered on behalf of Enterprise Nation to business owners in Reigate on selling through social media, aiding overseas brand awareness.
4. Facebook,YouTube
VK (VKontakte), Odnoklassniki
Germany, Austria, Switzerland; XING
France;Viadeo
Spain;Tuenti
SinaWeibo, Qzone,Tecent, WeChat
Twitter
LinkedIn and Instagram
Australia & NZ - Reddit
USA
Eastern
Europe
Western
Europe
China
Japan
Africa
Aus & NZ
5. Social media drives e-commerce referrals more than
any other channel.
Estimated that annual social commerce revenues will
exceed $165 billion by 2021
In UK social media is worth £900 million to retailers
Social shopping earnings increased by an estimated
24% 2016 – 2017 for the top 500 retailers ($6.5
billion)
11. LookYour Best
BuildYour Reputation & Credibility
Analyse Existing Efforts
Network
Listen & Engage
Convert Into Subscribers
78% of social
sellers outsell
peers who
don't use social
media
12.
13. The 6 Social Commerce Dimensions
Scarcity
Affinity
Reciprocity
Popularity
Authority
Consistency
Where are your markets, what platforms are your potential customers using?
In Jan, Vincenzo Cosenza, a marketing strategist specialising in social media released his latest stats that showed
out of 167 countries analysed, Facebook was most popular in 152 of them.
Instagram was found to be in 2nd place in 23 countries and Twitter has had major growth in 22.
Reddit, the news feed platform, is also growing in popularity.
You may need to choose which platforms to have a presence on, out of the major ones, based on the user demographics.
For example, Twitter isn’t perhaps the best choice to reach older consumers.
And I say may, because if you are targeting business owners and marketing managers like us, those types of targets can be spread across several age groups.
We have plenty of platforms to choose from in the UK and most of these are used across the world, Instagram, Facebook inc Messenger, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, Google+, Reddit
but other regions have their own favourite platforms – for example,
China have Qzone which is bigger than Insta in terms of monthly active users and they also like WeChat, which has very successfully integrated purchasing functionality.
So why sell via social media? Known as social commerce, selling through social media is growing. It’s a chance to take your products and services to where your customers are hanging out online.
Currently only 2% of US retail sales are social commerce but it’s estimated that in the US, revenues will exceed $165 billion within the next 3 years.
For the UK that £900 million translates into 1 in 3 UK consumers being eager to make purchases directly through social networks.
So for a couple of minutes I will focus on Facebook, the most popular platform for now and 1 with most powerful targeting system.
FB offers the most complete in-app shopping experience via the fully integrated Shop.
2 ways to populate a Facebook Shop with products and accept payments:
-Upload product data and connect PayPal or Stripe directly to Facebook Shop for free
-Use a paid or free ecommerce platform that does this for you, plus lets you sell products on your own website, on blogs, and on other social channels, too.
Even if you want a fully-fledged ecommerce site eventually, FB can be a good testing ground for your marketplace if you’ve already got a good following.
Here are examples of companies selling via Facebook business page…… make sure your product photos are of excellent quality.
One shop is taking the customer to etsy and this one is taking them through to the website. And if you are clever within your cart at the destination, there’s also an opportunity to upsell there.
Ecwid, free cloud-based solution if you want to create your online store and product listings outside of FB then connect them to various places such as eBay or Google Shopping, other social channels. Organise them all from one place.
Free, no charges or commissions but do check the packages for any product number restrictions.
After you’ve connected your store, FB do have to approve your product listings, which can take up to 48 hours.
If you sell online and offline, you don’t want to sell your last one of something and it still be available in your online store.
Ecwid is also integrated with POS systems like Square and Clover, which tie your offline and online inventory together to make sure you don’t oversell any of your items.
Let’s talk about Instagram, which has come a long way recently with the Shopping tool that now allows businesses to tag products they put in posts on their Instagram feed.
For anyone that doesn’t use Instagram, urls are not allowed within posts only within profile bio’s and within Stories feature and even that shows as a ‘See more’ link, so When a user clicks on the tag (show example), they’re taken to the company’s website to make a purchase.
► Create at least 9 shopping posts on your Instagram business profile to activate the Shop tab for your audience.
► Can tag multiple products in a single post to help your audience explore and browse.
► Use different shopping formats — tag a single image or a carousel (a group of pictures that rotate).
► Use “Stories” (Instagram’s short videos) to show your audience that they can now shop your posts.
Tools, like Shopify can make any post shoppable.
Pinterest have buyable pins and “click to shop” ads are available on YouTube.
Twitter did trial buy links and donate links for a while but decided to stop offering their commerce options a couple of years ago.
Remember, with all social media content, watch out for how cultural differences, spelling and how it will be interpreted worldwide.
If you are a service-based business, like us, you may have found that a lot of this product-focused talk isn’t right for you. Doesn’t mean you can’t sell on social.
You may have come across a term called Social Selling and if you’re searching for social media sales advice online you will certainly come across this a lot.
Social selling is the art of using social networks to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects...
It’s using the social platforms in more of an online networking way, to keep you—and your brand front of mind, so you’re the natural first point of contact when someone is ready to buy.
If you’re on social networks in a business capacity, you’ve already taken the first step.
Most of the tips here are self-explanatory, but what do I mean when I say analyse existing efforts?
This is about monitoring the traffic you get from social media and checking how long people stay on the page,
whether they progress via a call-to-action perhaps or looking at your social media actions and seeing what is working.
LinkedIn produced the first-of-its-kind social selling measurement – The Social Selling Index (SSI). They found a strong correlation between achieving sales goals and sales people with a high SSI. (click) The figures are impressive….
Social commerce is about people influencing people. And as social intelligence author Daniel Coleman said, it’s important to
be conversational, be honest and be remarkable.
Encourage your customers to do the word of mouth marketing for you and share their experiences.
Also actively build reviews and ratings to aid the decision-making stage for other customers. Make request a key part of your sales and marketing process.
The 6 social commerce dimensions are all about the psychology and behaviour behind purchases.
Scarcity – less is more, adding to the perceived value
Affinity – shopping with like-minded people
Reciprocating – paying back and paying it forwards
Popularity – following the crowd
Authority – following the experts
Consistency – throughout the buying experience
These can achieved through ecommerce elements such as expert videos, tactics like showing how many products are left available to buy, hotels.com – how many times this hotel was booked in the last hour etc and for services – having brand advocates (BF group example),
expert speaking slots and giving away valuable free resources like whitepapers.
Understanding the 6 dimensions means a more cohesive and connected online experience for customers and that leads to more sales.
Although we are here to talk about selling through social media, with all sm activity for business it’s important to build your brand visibility and establish brand values and not just try to sell.
This can be done through social posts - ensuring the businesses brand values are in place and communicated both visually and through messaging. Your content should be 80% informative, engaging and 20% selling. I wrote a blog post about this which is on our website if that helps.
