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The Rise of Social Commerce: How Brands Can Leverage Social Media to Drive Sales

Person holding a phone, engaging in social commerce as it drives sales

Social media has become an essential marketing tool for growing your business’ reach and reputation. However, another one of social media’s goals, like other marketing, is to convert that attention into sales. One of the best tools for accomplishing that is ‘Social Commerce’, where products are sold directly on social media. We’ll explain what social commerce is and how you can leverage social media to drive sales.

What is Social Commerce?

Social commerce is selling products directly through a social media platform. Product discovery, selection, and checkout all occur on the platform rather than redirecting individuals to your own store. It’s a service that is now available on most major social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. For all three, you create product listings that appear in a shop on your account. Users can then browse and order products directly through the app. In exchange for offering the service, the platform takes a percentage of the sale as a fee. 

The Benefits of Social Commerce

Social commerce is different from eCommerce which happens on a business’ own dedicated website or online store. As a result, you have slightly less control over the presentation, and it requires creating a store dedicated to the platform. However, there are clear benefits to using social commerce to drive sales. 

People Use Social Media to Shop

Over 80% of users research products using social media and nearly half of both Millennials and Gen Z are already making purchases on social media. Social commerce immediately drives sales because you provide a shopping experience for these many users precisely when they are actively searching for or considering products. 

A Seamless Shopping Experience

That immediacy and convenience also translate into an effective shopping experience that helps further drive sales. Social commerce provides the opportunity for a potential customer to immediately purchase upon discovering a product they like. This creates a more streamlined shopping experience. Rather than leaving the app, navigating to the product on your digital store, adding it to their cart, and filling in their information to complete their purchase, the user can immediately checkout and continue their browsing. The eCommerce checkout can be a moment where carts are abandoned and sales lost. The speedy and seamless shopping experience of social commerce means there are fewer chances to lose the customer’s attention and that purchase.

A More Thorough Representation of Your Business on Social

Another benefit of social commerce is that you can better showcase the products that your company provides on social media. You could make posts for every product you sell, and you should highlight new items, but these inherently move down the feed as time progresses. Those ever-drifting posts aren’t an effective way to continuously show off your entire catalogue. Instead, the dedicated storefront of a social commerce space on your profile allows social media users to conveniently get a better sense of your products and services without needing to leave the app. 

Shopping That Reaches Your Audience

Social media platforms have an incredible amount of user data at their disposal. With social commerce, you can use that data to promote specific products to those whom the platform knows to have certain interests. Because of the wealth of data available, these product suggestions can be highly specific. For example, one product might suit a certain demographic like men in their 40s, while another suits young adult women. Each can be selectively targeted on social commerce to users in those demographics. Specific product suggestions of this specificity on your own eCommerce store need a shopping history and will take time to generate. Social commerce allows you to specifically tailor such suggestions and promotions from the start.

Social Commerce Isn’t the End of eCommerce

Social commerce has clear benefits for driving sales, but it doesn’t replace eCommerce and having a dedicated digital store and website. It’s an addition and effective supplement to your eCommerce strategy. Ultimately, the goal is to drive sales away from social media platforms, which take a 2-5% cut, to shopping and browsing on your own digital storefront. There customers can browse and better familiarize themselves with your products in a space that is exclusively dedicated to them. Social commerce’s strength is in getting new customers as they are generally browsing and securing that initial sale. That sale then converts someone into a dedicated customer when they understand the quality of your products. 

Making the Most of Social Commerce

Social commerce’s ability to convert and drive sales lies in the shopping convenience it creates for those actively browsing. It’s a valuable tool for attracting and recapturing dedicated customers. If you think social commerce is part of your next social media strategy, contact us at Rosewood. We’ll be happy to help you expand your eCommerce horizons. 

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The Role of Video Marketing in 2023: Trends and Best Practices

Someone working on a laptop beside a cup of coffee

Video is becoming a dominant tool in marketing. More people are consuming video content each day, and all the major social media apps, including Facebook and Instagram are pivoting to emphasize video to compete with the continued interest in YouTube and the rise of TikTok. To help you create great video advertising and social media, we discuss the role of video marketing for your business and the biggest trends and best practices to follow for 2023.

The Impressive Results of Video Marketing

Video marketing’s role has only grown this past decade as online video has become more and more widespread and easy to share. In 2018, already 78% of marketers found video marketing produced great ROI. This year, that’s grown to 92%. A study from Wyzowl also found that 79% of customers say a video has convinced them to purchase a service or product, while 91% want to see more video content from the brands they follow. Those numbers reflect not only the efficacy of video marketing, but also how its role as a marketing asset is growing.

Standing Out – The Role of Video Marketing

Video marketing plays a vital role by allowing your brand to show off more of its personality and character. Video ads and social media are great for showing off products, services, and your business in action. However, with video marketing also becoming a standard and a common part of most marketing strategies, you need to ensure your video gets attention by following leading trends and best practices. 

The Best Trends and Practices for 2023

To help your videos stand out, we’ve assembled some of the trends and best practices for 2023 to help your videos get those views they deserve.

Short Videos

As the rapid growth of TikTok shows, short videos get a lot of attention and are extremely effective for getting views. In fact, two-thirds of consumers found short videos more engaging, impactful, and memorable than longer videos. Although TikTok’s future in Canada might be a little unclear, since it has been banned on government employee phones, even Ottawa still recognizes the power of short videos for marketing. Other social media platforms have as well. Instagram launched Reels and YouTube launched Shorts in 2020. These short videos are an effective way to market parts of your business, especially since all three platforms prioritize these shorter videos for their users.

The Perfect, Endless Loop Keeps Them Watching

Along with short videos, the endless loop has become a best practice for increasing views and engagement. Together, looping and brevity cooperate to create snappy videos that your audience watches multiple times. Those multiple views will also give your video preference in the platform’s algorithm, so loops are great for growing your video’s reach. An easy way to create a seamless loop is to have the final moments of the video be the same shot or a few seconds earlier in the clip that starts the video. 

SEO

Short length and multiple views from seamless loops will optimize your videos for the suggestion algorithms. There are also methods to boost your videos’ SEO, especially any longer videos that won’t have these benefits. Properly title your videos to match search terms and include keywords in the descriptions. Focus videos on addressing questions and educating your audience; people are often looking for answers. Your videos will also receive SEO preference if you post consistently. 

Faces in Thumbnails

Another tactic is including human faces in thumbnails. You have surely noticed that a lot of video thumbnails on YouTube and other platforms often include people with emotive facial expressions. The simple reason is that those videos get more attention and views. People are naturally drawn to human faces, and expressive faces attract our interest. As a result, at least 72% of popular videos on YouTube include a human face.

Silent Videos with Captions

Besides what will help your video get immediate attention and clicks, you need to create videos that people want to watch and engage with. One of the best practices that has developed in the last couple years is ensuring your video can be watched silently. Many of your audience will watch your videos in a setting where they can’t or prefer not to have audio on. As a result, you need to add accurate captions so that anyone can watch the video without sound. Otherwise, they will simply move on. All platforms include automatic tools to help you generate those captions, but you need to edit them thoroughly for accuracy. This will make your videos both watchable in complete silence as well as more accessible to those with hearing difficulties.

Creating Real Moments – Live Video and Stories

Another great way to generate engagement and attention in your video marketing is creating momentary content with live video and short-lived videos like Instagram Stories. Since these are time limited or specific to the moment, they create FOMO (a fear of missing out). Thus, live videos and interactive Stories are fantastic ways to directly engage with your audience, as they want to become a part of the moment themselves by participating in the chat, reacting, or providing their own input. This, in turn, forms real connections with your audience. 

Being “Real” – Raw Video, Behind the Scenes, and User-Generated Content

Since live content and stories are typically more “raw” and often show behind-the-scenes (BTS) footage, they capitalize on a trend that emphasizes your brand’s authenticity. Less edited videos that show your business’ operations provide your audience with a more sincere presentation. Similarly, reposting and sharing user-generated video content is a great way to show your brand’s authenticity and its engagement with its audience. 

Video Marketing 

Thanks to the ubiquity of smart phones, it has only become easier to start creating video content, and its growing popularity means it’s essential for your marketing. If you want to ensure your video marketing is following the latest trends and best practices, contact our advertising team to create attention-grabbing video ads. Our social media team will help ensure your video content is engaging. Plus, if you’re looking for some more professionally shot and edited content, be sure to look at our video packages.

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Social Media Metrics You Need to Be Tracking

Social media metrics on an iPad Screen.

Social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram love numbers and are raring to give you countless metrics to look through and manage. However, not all those numbers are created equal. Some deserve more of your attention than others, and those should be understood and interpreted in a certain way. This guide will help you find the social media metrics you need to be tracking and pick out the valuable numbers.

Growth Rate

Your follower number is a central number on your accounts and an easy thing to fixate on. Your follower number does provide a broad impression of your audience, but a small or large number doesn’t provide much information for planning your accounts’ content. Furthermore, while some followers are certainly legitimate, other followers could be automated accounts or accounts that haven’t signed in for years. This is why it’s often called a “vanity metric”. 

Instead, how your follow number changes is the metric your need to be tracking. The rate of growth in your followers over certain periods of time is a lot more informative and valuable. This reflects your account’s performance to determine which content and strategies prove effective for growing your audience. These metrics also are more informative about your audience, since they reflect active followers who are more likely to engage with your content. 

Reach

Reach is an insightful metric you need to be tracking and monitoring. This records the number of different individuals who have seen your content. This is different from impressions or views, which track the total amount of times something was seen, including repeats by the same people. Reach more accurately reflects the size of the audience that is viewing your social media content.

Reach will often differ from your follower number. No social media account sees its content reaching all its followers. However, reach does not only measure your followers. It tracks every user who has seen your content, and that includes followers as well as those who may have seen it through hashtags, recommendations by the platform, or through shares from other users. It’s the entire net your social media has cast. 

This is why “reach rate” is not an accurate metric. Reach rate is calculated by dividing the reach of some content by the number of your followers. For example, if you have 400 followers and a post’s reach was 100, that is a reach rate of 25%. However, because reach doesn’t just include your followers, this rate doesn’t really tell you anything. 

Growing your reach is essential to increasing your social media’s audience. Different aspects can affect a post’s reach. The time of posting, the hashtags, key phrases, and the kind of content can all affect how far a post spreads. Keep any of these factors in mind when you’re tracking this metric to determine the most effective strategies for expanding your social media’s reach.

Engagement Rates

Another metric you need to track that tells you more than just how many eyeballs saw your content, is how many people take the effort to “engage” with it. Social media engagement refers to any action that goes beyond viewership. Likes, comments, saves, favorites, shares, and reposts are all forms of engagement that reflect members of your audience going beyond just passive viewership. Engagement provides the insightful metric of not how many people saw it or how often, but how many truly internalized the content to be able to form some kind of response that led to a real action.

Engagement is also important because it’s part of how social media algorithms, including Facebook’s, Instagram’s, and TikTok’s, prioritize content in people’s feeds. Posts with better engagement will populate higher on follower’s feeds and as recommendations. Therefore, engagement rates are not merely a metric you need to track for what is really reaching and speaking to your audience, but also for how to improve that reach.

Saves and Shares 

Saves and shares are a form of engagement that deserve your special attention. Social media services allow users to both “save” or “favorite” posts to their account and share them to others. Both these metrics are also recorded, and you need to track them. Sharing or saving means users were not merely wanting to momentarily engage with a piece of content. Saving indicates they want to come back to it and look at it multiple times, and possible show others. Sharing means someone felt a certain piece of content needed to be shown to someone else. Both are fantastic ways to see what kind of content is engaging and will help you grow a devoted following. 

You Need to Track and Analyze

These are the social media metrics you need to be tracking, but they aren’t entirely straightforward. The numbers never just speak for themselves. There are a lot of factors that can change your account’s growth rate and its contents’ reach and engagement. That’s why you need to interpret the data accordingly. If you are noticing certain trends and want help figuring out how to improve your growth, reach, engagement rates or want to start using some platforms that help manage this data, contact Rosewood’s social media marketing team, who are masters of understanding the metrics you need to be tracking.

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