The innovative demand-led social shopping marketplace Pikaba has shared 5 simple and smart tips for profiting from social commerce – broadly defined as helping people connect where they buy, and buy where they connect.
We especially like the target-communities-not-individuals tip, which for us is the essence of smart social strategy – commercial or otherwise.
Group-thinking is key to harnessing the power of groups, because unless you think and target in terms of groups (that exist in and for themselves – not some artificial marketing salami), you are unlikely to benefit from word of mouth networks and collective buying power. It’s reminiscent of the truism that businesses and brands should not try to create communities, but serve them.
One recent social commerce example of group-thinking is the newly launched GroundswellHealth, a social commerce platform for the professional medical community – made up of interlocking loose weak-tie professional networks – offering deep volume discounts on medical supplies in the form of group-buy offers.
And it’s here we think group psychology may be a useful source of social commerce insight (we’re preparing a post on group-pyschology). In the meantime, check out these simple but smart tips from Pikaba:
- Get more customers by selling to small communities not to an individual.
- Exceed your customer expectations by creating special deals and offers virtually on the fly.
- Create fan-stores and online marketplaces to integrate social networks into the retail experience.
- Be visible on social networks: enjoy buzz and product reviews.
- Boost your SEO and social media efforts.
