Social Commerce: Tips for the New Era It’s happened again. We took our attention away from Twitter briefly and it surprised us with a groundbreaking innovation. Remember our last blog on Social Commerce? We wrote that soon after Twitter teamed up with Amazon to bring in the tweet-to-buy hash-tag #AmazonCart. We talked about how different retailers were going social on their site. Twitter, with its meager140 characters, with this single act has made itself more important than most of the social media sites that are popular. It has brought in a little button that reads “Buy”. With that simple but big move, it has taken the next step on the journey to complete social media and ecommerce integration. Close to 30twitter accounts including the ecommerce stores Burberry and The Home Depot are already experimenting with this feature. These are two ecommerce vendors who are going to receive some extra attention from customers and competitors in the coming months. While we can’t say what Twitter or any other social media site might do in the future, we do have some tips to help you prepare for the rapidly changing but beautiful, connected world of social commerce. Here are some steps you can take now to prepare for when social commerce matures: • Plug-in: As you take your organization social, it is important that your customers be able to directly access their personal social media persona when on your site. So add the entire plethora of plug-ins you think are relevant to your customers. If you don’t want too many, limit it to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn; that should keep most customers happy. • Display: Once you connect your customers to their favorite social media sites, you need to make your presence felt there. Chances are you already have some accounts or pages on the various sites, either already engaging with customers or engaging with employees. If you have a page or account for employee engagement, create a separate one for customer engagement. • Update: Constant vigilance! Get your social media/marketing team to keep you up to date on new developments on the platforms your organization is on. If they introduce something new, you need to know immediately so you can get your site developers and ecommerce platform vendors to add the feature you need to your site. • Support: This is something that organizations, e-stores or otherwise, need to have – a support team handling the social media. Many customers tweet or post on the organization’s page/profile about an issue they face, and organizations that respond quickly either with immediate resolutions, or proper communication about how they can help resolve the issue gain brownie points in their followers’ books. These steps will make sure that your site is prepared for when social commerce becomes the “in” thing and your customers will be happy to work with a vendor who is easily accessible.
Author:- Merlyn Netto is a technical consultant at Unilog Corp. He writes articles on topics related to B2B eCommerce Software. http://www.unilogcorp.com