The Four Areas of Social Commerce

What we’ve learned from two years of social commerce research is that if an insight is useful in one area of social commerce, it’s also usually useful and applicable in another.

That’s what the Internet is for. So a word of warning, if you are looking for a guide to select or deploy this or that social commerce application or technology-this is not where you’ll find it. Instead, this article is written to provide you with a set of insight-led guiding principles to help you unlock the sales potential of social media today and tomorrow-whatever the technology deployed. We’ve looked at what are working and what isn’t and used insights from sales psychology and social psychology to explain it, most notably drawing on the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini, a specialist in both fields. If you are familiar with Cialdini’s research, you’ll see that we are greatly indebted to his work.

SAY HELLO TO THE SOLOMO SHOPPER

Although the 20 secrets revealed in the social commerce are diverse and eclectic, two major themes emerge when they are viewed together. The first is that social commerce tends to work best when you are selling to a new breed of consumer-the “SOLOMO consumer,” i.e., people who shop smart with

1. SOcial
2. LOcation-aware
3. MObile technology

Consider the following:

Social:

23 percent: Online time people spend with social media-social networking is now the #1 online activities

86 percent: People who consult online reviews before buying; 90 percent trust the reviews they read

42 percent: Proportion of U.S. online adults who follow a retailer via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or blog

6: The average number of brands or businesses people follow in social media

56 percent: Facebook users who have clicked through to a retailer website from a Facebook post

28 percent: Facebook users who have purchased something online via a link on Facebook

35 percent: People who would buy products on Facebook;

32 percent would do so as of Twitter

25 percent: Google searches done on the YouTube video sharing site; YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine

52 percent: People who share deals from local deal sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial

50 percent+: People more likely to buy from businesses they follow in social media

53 percent: People on Twitter who recommend companies and/or products in their Tweets

12: Degree of trust people have in shared consumers reviews compared to business-communicated information

90 percent: People trusting recommendations from people they know; 70 percent trust opinions of unknown users

Local:

300 percent: User growth of location-based services in 2010-services that have evolved from games to include deals, recommendations, and reviews

95 percent: Mobile users using their mobile devices to find local information; 88 percent take action based
on that information

70 percent: Online mobile users who use their mobile devices to help shopping in-store

47 percent: People who access customer reviews in-store via mobile devices

86 percent: People using the web to find local businesses: 20 percent+ of all Google searches have a local intent

78 percent: Mobile users who have purchased from a local deals site

76 percent: Smartphone owners who have made an in-store purchase based on information accessed from their phone

49 percent: Smartphone users who use their phones to get local promotions and coupons

45 percent: Online European consumers who have researched a product online and then bought it in a shop