- BDAILY PREMIUM -
With social media becoming an integral part of our day to day lives, its only natural that it has also become a key foothold for businesses to reach new clients and expand their brands. This being said, for businesses, it can be difficult to know where to market your brands with so many options to choose from.
As part of Bdaily’s latest feature day celebrating Social Media Day, I’ve decided to cut through the jargon to find out which sites businesses should use to make the most of social media e-commerce.
Recent research by Sortlist laid out how social media e-commerce works on Instagram, Tik Tok and Pinterest, as well as importantly finding out how these sites can help the businesses utilising them. Read on to find out more…
Instagram posts are shown to users based on the user’s following list, post relevancy and user likes. For businesses, that means users who follow or interact with similar brands are more likely to see your available items. Videos on Instagram can be as long as two minutes and can take the form of a story, reel or post.
Instagram shop allows eligible businesses to integrate in-app purchases, however, this function is not available for worldwide accounts. Instagram shop does not yet support shop profiles, which could make it harder for brands to showcase all their products in one place.
Tik Tok
On TikTok, posts are promoted to users based on relevance and quality. TikTok ads often favour high-paying brands, showing in-feed ads based on the bid price. TikTok shop supports in-app purchases for most accounts, although sellers can choose to redirect customers to their external domain.
Improving the user experience, in-app shopping means users can build a shopping cart of items from different brands which makes for a more seamless checkout experience. TikTok users can view all available products from an account, by navigating to the shop tab on the account profile.
Pinterest takes into account the ‘quality’ of the pinner, which is based on how often you pin content and how much interaction your pins usually get. Pinterest brands have more freedom to showcase products by taking advantage of the maximum video ad limit of 15 minutes.
Shoppable pins on Pinterest support in-app checkout for a limited number of Shopify accounts, boosting the user experience and reducing the need for your business to have a website. Pinterest shop supports businesses having an in-app shop profile page, so users can get to know your brand identity by viewing all of your available products in one place.
Logging out
Social media e-commerce is infancy, however it’s potential to enable small businesses to connect with whole new audiences is apparent.
Moreover, each platform provides unique and compelling reasons for different kinds of businesses to engage with it, meaning those wishing to break into e-commerce can select a platform or platforms based on the needs of the business, as opposed to simply going with what’s popular at the time.
By Mark Adair, Correspondent, Bdaily
