The ever-expanding craze that is Social Commerce – All you need to know!

There are many different types of eCommerce – as technologies grow we see online retail develop and branch out into different areas. One particular new type of commerce that is becoming immensely popular is social commerce. This article and infographic aims to outline exactly what social commerce is, and why it is becoming so popular.

Social commerce in essence is a combination of social networking and eCommerce. Have you ever noticed the Facebook Marketplace? Or the Instagram shoppable feeds? Or the Twitter and Facebook ‘buy now’ buttons?

These are examples of social commerce – where social media platforms either work together with third party eCommerce apps, or implement their own eCommerce features thus allowing users to purchase goods and services through their network. Social commerce opens the possibility for various interactions between brands and consumer, creating stronger and often mutually beneficial connection.

Although this is a new concept, evidence of social commerce has been present as far back as 2007 when Facebook launched a virtual gift sale test. Since then, the main social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube have created a myriad of different social commerce features. Pinterest for example has buyable pins, Instagram has integration with Shopify, and Twitter has promoted Tweets.

So what makes this type of commerce so successful and popular?

A large portion of the reason is due to the immense popularity of social media itself – millions of people have social media profiles and check their feeds on a daily basis.

Social media is a powerful tool and enabling selling functions on the platforms makes business sense – you can appeal to a much wider audience, and also your selling functions are available 24/7.

As new and innovative methods of social commerce are created, we should only see an increase in its use as more social media platforms follow suit.

The infographic below provides an overview of social commerce and some interesting stats and figures about the industry: