What is the impact of social media on e-commerce?

In this day and age, social media has a HUGE impact on eCommerce. Social media has it’s metaphorical hand in a lot of different stages of eCommerce. Starting from how a customer first interacts with a brand, to the checkout stage, to post-checkout, social media is a driving force. We’ll break down what we like to call the Shopper Journey to give you better insight.

To set up the example let’s bring in a hypothetical shopper -- we’ll call him Kyle. As Kyle goes through his shopper journey we’ll show how he interacts with social media at different touchpoints.

1. Awareness: Kyle’s flipping through his Instagram feed and sees a picture of his friend at the gym. “Wow, Mike’s making me look bad,” he thinks to himself. “I didn’t know AddPants (sorry guys, not a real company) has a line of athletic wear. Summer is on the horizon, maybe a fresh set of workout gear is just the motivation I needs to get to the gym.” Kyle clicks through to the Hanes Instagram account, then on to the Hanes website.
2. Interest: He’s greeted by a targeted message just for Instagram users that lets him know Hanes is having a sale on athletic wear this week.
   1. Behavioral Targeting is implemented at this point in the shopper journey by feeding off of social media and using it as a data point for personalization.
3. Consideration: He notices that if he shares with his friends that he’ll get an instant coupon directly on the website. Usually he has to search multiple websites for active coupons, so this is a real time saver.
   1. This is Social Rewards at work. This incentivizes your potential customers to share our your brand in order to get a small reward. With this campaign in place, you can get your brand out in multiple networks without having to do the work yourself.
4. Purchase: After adding the sweatpants to his cart, he reaches the checkout page and notices that he can login using his existing Facebook account. He doesn’t have to fill in any more info so checkout is a breeze.
   1. Here goes social media once again, making life simpler (round of applause). Social Login gets customers through to checkout faster, reducing your cart abandon rate, which does wonders for your conversion rates. PLUS Social Login gives you awesome actionable data that you can use for future marketing endeavors (name, email, age, birthday, gender, etc).
5. Retention+Advocacy: 3 weeks after his order, AddPants sends Kyle an email telling him that for every friend he refers he’ll earn $20 off his next order and his friends will save $20 each as well.
   1. Social media back at it again. Setting up a campaign like this through Refer-a-Friend is a foolproof way for your customers to do the legwork of “word of mouth” online marketing. Customers like Kyle can send these referrals to his friends via social media networks, or, through email.

The power of social media is mind-blowing. It’s a marketer's best friend and a customer haven for a seamless shopping experience. Make social media work for your brand with the right tools. We’ve mentioned a lot about our platform throughout this hypothetical shopper journey (full disclosure, we’re an integrated on-site marketing platform that provides solutions for all of the situations mentioned).