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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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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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Inspiring a Community Through Social Media

An inspiring bookshelf with various books beside a pink chair.

Your follower number is an important metric for determining your brand’s reach, but it means little if that that audience isn’t regularly engaging with your content. That engagement creates a dedicated community around your business. If your content inspires engagement, said community will become invested in supporting, maintaining, and expanding the reach of your brand. That all starts by having a content strategy that inspires and motivates your followers to engage, so here are key tactics of a strategy that builds an inspired community.

Engage and Respond to Your Community

One of your first and best tactics for forming and inspiring your community to engage is by engaging with them. Respond to their comments, posts, and feedback to your content. Be sure to engage with them on your content and theirs. Everyone enjoys some acknowledgement. Giving your community members that attention, will inspire them to engage even more. Others who see that activity will also be more encouraged to engage. Everyone will be inspired to engage with each other, forming true communal bonds around your brand.

Keep That Community Positive

You need to maintain a healthy and safe space to keep that engagement and your community flourishing. Online communities need moderation and supervision. It’s unfortunately easy in online spaces for someone to enter and be toxic. Along with being harmful, they will scare off others from engaging. Be sure to remove that kind of activity from your community to keep dedicated followers and your community healthy. Followers will continue to energetically engage and those who witness that moderation will be inspired to remain in your brand’s safe community.

Educate, Entertain, and Inform

Along with promotional content, provide a variety of content that is educational, entertaining, and informative. The variety keeps your community actively interested and engaged. Educational content can teach your audience about some niche information about your brand and industry. Behind the scenes (BTS) content showcases your company’s human element, and the insider view lets your audience feel connected of your brand and its people. Entertaining content is another opportunity to show off your brand’s personality. It can also jump on a recent social media trend. That further inspires a community who will want to engage with the momentarily relevant content. 

Championing a Cause

It may seem outside your business’ scope to have your brand comment on a societal issue, but championing a cause helps unite and inspire your community. In 2019, Edelman found that 81% of people felt they must trust a brand to purchase from them, and in 2021, they found customers are 7x more likely to purchase from brands they trust. A central factor of that trust is not just honest business practices. People’s trust in businesses relies on their stance on a social issue. 53% of customers say they need their brands to take a stand on at least one social issue, and 86% expect brands to take one or more actions beyond their business or production, primarily addressing at least one societal concern. 

Motivating your followers to contribute or benefit such a social cause will inspire and empower them. They will associate your brand and its community with a larger social impact and benefit. Posts on a certain issue relevant to your brand provide a great opportunity for your followers to engage and feel inspired. If you brand contributes to a charity, you can encourage followers to also donate or promote. Brands for charitable organizations or non-profits can directly inspire followers to action by engaging directly with your content, fundraisers, and events.

Stick to Your Brand and Its Values

Your brand shouldn’t champion every cause or jump on every trend. It will reduce your content’s impact, confuse your brand’s core personality, and undermine its authenticity. Brand personalities are like people; they need to stay consistent for people to trust them. Stick to a select few causes that pair with the character and values of your brand. Your followers and customers can associate these with your brand. A fashion business may promote a cause for body positivity or a charity that provides clothes to the impoverished. Any small business can champion a charity or cause that’s part of their local community. 

Recognize Your Community

Beyond just engaging and inspiring them, have content that recognizes your community. If your community creates their own content with your brand or participates in your charitable acts, be sure to acknowledge and celebrate those accomplishments. If your business sees some success or reaches a certain milestone, recognize how your community has played an important role in that accomplishment. This recognition of a symbiotic relationship strengthens your followers’ bonds with your brand. They will only be more inspired to engage with and support your business and brand.

Start An Inspiring Strategy

With these essential tactics you can start to build a strategy of inspiring content. An engaged community around your brand will stay dedicated to supporting your business and expanding its reach. If you’re looking to build a social media strategy and start creating inspiring content suited to your brand, talk with Rosewood’s social media marketing team. We can help you flesh out an entire long-term plan for inspiring that following.

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