Social media and online shopping seem like a natural partnership – combining symbiotic platforms where people spend vast amounts of time expressing themselves, browsing images and trading recommendations with the ease and convenience of buying stuff.
However, social commerce hasn’t been an overnight success. The early hype surrounding ‘Buy’ buttons on social media failed to catch on and dedicated social shopping platforms have remained stubbornly niche.
Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends report suggests that the marriage might finally be taking root, particularly with the 18-34 age group, who are now discovering products on social networks in record numbers – and often going on to buy them.
In a survey of 1,000 US consumers, 78% of 18-34-year-olds said they had discovered products on Facebook within the last three months, while fifty-nine percent also reported discovering products on Instagram and Pinterest, demonstrating the potency of visual social media. Meeker also indicates that the share of referrals from social feeds to ecommerce sites is on the up. According to data gathered by Adobe, the percentage of ecommerce referrals coming from social networks has risen four percentage points in three years, from 2% in Q1 2015 to 6% in Q1 2018.Meeker points to a couple of principal causes:1)the amount of time we spend on social media has risen exponentially over the past five years: according to the Global Web Index, the global daily time spent on social media has risen from 90 minutes in 2012 to 135 minutes in 2018.2)Facebook’s astonishing and continuing growth makes it the king of eCommerce product discovery, and Facebook ad click-throughs to ecommerce sites are also on the rise.
Social media, of course, is here to stay ... and eSellers need to get on board and ride its coat-tails to greater sales and higher customer engagement.
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