Social Commerce Makeover: 7 Things Your Brand Should Be Doing Today – Summary & Link to Fluid Webinar

So here’s a summary of, and link to, what in our view is probably the best webinar to date on social commerce, from the good folks at the digital retail agency pioneering social commerce, Fluid.

Presented by Andrew Sirotnik (Fluid’s chief experience officer) and Amy Lanigan (Fluid VP Strategy), the 30 minute webinar is a field report into successful selling with social media, covering the 7 proven components of an effective social commerce makeover for your brand.  If you’re at all interested in social commerce, then this webinar is probably one of the best 30 minute investments you can make – full of real world case studies, metrics and insights.

But for those short on time, here’s a summary of key points from the webinar with screenshots of some key slides (7 of 25).  The summary notwithstanding, it’s still well worth watching the recorded free webinar…

1. Start Selling on Social Platforms – Open a Facebook storefront to experiment with social commerce opportunities – flash sales, group buy, tryvertising, social CRM.  It’s fast, inexpensive, and simple to implement – a sandbox for future-proofing your e-commerce strategy. Apparel brand Rachel Roy set up a pop-up storefront in Facebook which resulted in an e-commerce revenue jump (3rd highest revenue day), as well as a 100% jump in Facebook followers.

2. Add Mobile into the Social Mix – for example, allow users to share comments and content to mobile via SMS. 33% of 18-44 access product info via mobile in store, and US mobile commerce will grow 100% this year to $2.4bn.  Get in on the ground level by adding share to mobile features. When sneaker brand Vans implemented share by SMS on it’s sneaker customization site, it led to  500+ SMS shares per week, contributing to a 150% increase in sales.

3. Implement Facebook Social Plugins – start by adding the Like button to product pages on your e-commerce site as TripAdvisor, Levi’s and Threadless have done.  By doing this, you get your product onto Facebook walls – where click-through rates are a stunning 6.5%, driving traffic to your e-commerce site.  The Like button is the new mini review.

4. Cross-Sell/Up-Sell with Personal Recommendations – 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know, vs. 70% who trust anonymous reviews, and 67% of people spend more online after recommendations from friends.  So allow people to make persoal recommendation on your site – and consider adding a Friends Store as Levi’s has done.

5.  Integrate Chat on your e-commerce site – so friends can shop together and discuss products.  Luggage brand JanSport saw a 59% increase in product views and 147% increase in time on site after integrating a Chat feature on its site.

6.  Make your website your Social Flagship – social features are not just for social media platforms, use them on your website, by adding social media conversation feeds to your site, whilst exporting your content to social media platforms.  Fashion and fragrance brand Vera Wang (Princess) ran a tightly integrated photo sharing and design campaign on its site and on Facebook that became the highest trafficked section of the website, and resulted in 3500 submissions in 5 days, and that got embedded in 1600 blogs.

7. Bring the in-store (or brand event) experience online to social media platforms – to make all your channels social.  For example, appliance brand Kenmore deliver flagship store experiences on Facebook with live webcasts of in-store events – resulting in 40,000 new followers in six weeks.

Finally, when you’ve implemented your social commerce makeover, Fluid recommend looking closely at how you can future-proof your social commerce strategy by harnessing these three emerging social commerce trends:

I) Location Awareness – How can you harness location aware social networks such as FourSquare (from 100K to 1M users in six months), for example by connecting consumers near to each other for group-buy, couponing, scavenger hunts, alternate reality games, and augmented reality?  Take a look at Nike Grid campaign – and ask yourself what would be your brands version of this.

II) Niche Private Sale Sites – The next black in social commerce is likely to be niche flash/private sale sites – focusing on delivering flash sales to special communities.  What would be the Vente Privée/Gilt for your category – could you own such a site?  Take a look at TheClymb, MarketForDrama, and ShopTheSkinny that combine compelling and focused editorial with user content and flash sales. Could you run a specialized flash sale store in your category – selling other brands as well as your own? At the very least, could you run flash sales on your Facebook page to create buzz for new products?

III) Social Customizable Products – Most customers are not creative, so product personalization in e-commerce such as Nike ID used to be a niche market for creative types.  But now social technologies and slick checkout procedures allow shoppers to get social validation from their friends on customized purchases, and buy popular customized products that are fruits of someone else’s creativity. How could you offer social customization in e-commerce?

Niche Private Sale Sites