RECENT TRENDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA (2016)
We are all familiar with the term ‘Social Media’ after the breakthrough launch of ‘Facebook’ along with Orkut. Mark Zuckerberg has become a new superstar in the entrepreneurship world when his social media idea blew up unimaginably. From the past several years, many internet giants have routed into E-Commerce with the growing importance of social media platform, which is now in an expansion stage in many countries. After a decade of success of social media, we will highlight which major players are adding new features on their site & how it is useful for connecting with e-commerce and consumers.
Nearly half of the population of the world is on Facebook and almost everybody knows about the recent update and technical changes of the pioneer of the social media platforms. It is seen that they are now creating a unique “Buy Now” button wherein the users/followers of an e-commerce website can purchase the company’s products without leaving their Facebook page. Perhaps, now when a user clicks on the advertisement, they are diverted to a website that might not give him the desired conversion rate.
It is a professional site launched in the year 2003 and has more than 430 million accounts on the site. This site gives you the complete freedom & choice to connect with professionals from different parts of the world. It is commonly seen that the business house gets around 65% more business as compared to other social media sites. In terms of business to members, Linkedin is one of the cream sites to find professional people to do business with.
Twitter is the only site in the world that allows users to connect or interact directly with the celebrities and the brands. One of the recent updation of Twitter is that they will be allowing more than 140 characters in their tweet & other news is that they will be introducing the “Buy Now” option, but it doesn’t operate in the same manner as the one on Facebook does. It will re-direct to your website, but this news has not been confirmed by the company. Although, we are pretty sure that it will boost the E-Commerce sector in the coming years. Currently, if you have any message or grievance with any brand, you can directly approach them on Twitter and they reply ASAP.
Pinterest has recently merged with some of the well-established & new startup E-Commerce websites wherein you can pin the company, and they will automatically display their product details & pricing. Not only Pinterest displays the latest information, but also takes care that the visitors convert into subscribers and customers of the product. The officials think they might cross the average sales double than Facebook & Twitter combined.
How the Social Media will help the E-Commerce Business :
As per the study, consumers are likely to purchase a product twice from the brands that they follow on their personal or professional social media accounts. 80% of the consumers’ buying or selling decisions are based on reading the customer reviews online as they believe less in the mouth of publicity by the sellers. The consumers are now viewing & relying more on the social media before making a buying decision. They even compare the products price featured on different E-Commerce platforms like E-Bay or Amazon, based on reviews & ratings. All the factors like price comparisons, user reviews and effective promotions come into play for a user to buy a particular product.
Vendors need to prepare a comprehensive social strategy where they don't keep all of their eggs in one basket but spread them out across many. However, they should do a proportionate diversification i.e. diversification based on the popularity or ROI of the social commerce channels. In the above social channels mentioned, two of them i.e. social network driven sales and peer-peer platforms form the bulk of social commerce sales and hence, these should get first priority followed by others like group buying and reviews. The user-curated shopping is still in embryonic stage and will take some time to deliver sizable sales to vendors.