Best Practices for Social Media
Social Media Marketing
and Sales
Shopping
with Facebook and Twitter
We talk a lot about social media marketing - using social networks like
Facebook and Twitter to market brands and drive traffic to sites. There
is no question that these can be effective tools for doing both of these
things.
As time goes on, it may become helpful or perhaps even necessary to use
these tools for actual e-commerce. The common thinking behind social
media marketing is that you don't want to be too sales-pitchy in your
conversations, and in some ways that is still very true. However, while
social media is largely about conversations, it's not only about
conversations.
As time progresses, social media becomes a lot of things to a lot of
people. We've reached the point where social networks are simply "where
we hang out" online. People are not only having conversations. They're
sharing pictures. They're playing games. They're looking for
information. Right or wrong, they're using social networks to help them
make purchase decisions. Sometimes this is through conversation.
Sometimes it's as simple as being a fan of a brand's Facebook page and
receiving timely updates.
Has social media ever led you to an online purchase? Now
think about it. Probably NOT! So do you want to know about a
particular brand of TV, car or piece of luggage that even chimps can’t
ruin? Remember Consumer Reports! What a great place to get the truth,
and the whole truth by experts. Now I am not saying that Facebook and
Twitter are not good places to get info, but please.
Facebook has virtual currency, and is starting to open up possibilities
for transactions for physical goods.
Facebook Connect has
just been made easier for webmasters to implement on their
sites. That's huge. As people spend much of their time on Facebook, they
are pretty much relinquishing a certain amount of trust to the social
network, whether they realize it or not (and whether they should be or
not, but that's another issue).
If your site is plugged into Facebook via Facebook Connect, and they can
log in to your site to make purchases just by being logged into Facebook,
they may not find themselves as concerned with security issues.
Security concerns have long hindered the true potential of
e-commerce, and as a result, plenty of trustworthy e-commerce sites have
likely missed out on tons of sales, just because of the distrust of the
method of purchasing in general.
Now I'm not saying that Facebook Connect is a sign of security. In fact,
some might even suggest that it damages security, simply based on the
fact that Facebook is often associated with security issues. I'm just
saying, users are always signed in to Facebook anyway, and if they see
your site is connected with Facebook, they may have no problems signing
in with their Facebook info.
"Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a Website like Dell.com and
authenticate yourself using your Facebook profile, allow your identity
to be known and access your friends so you could spark up a chat," says
Paul Dunay, Global Managing Dir. of Services, Social Marketing with
Avaya in an interview with eMarketer. "So I could say, 'Hey, Jeff, I’m
looking at this new fancy laptop or this desk top computer. I heard you
bought something. Would you recommend this to me?'
"So you could almost take your friends shopping with you. That is the
potential with this example," he adds. "We're in a period now where
we’re all starting to get comfortable with Twitter and get comfortable
with using Facebook and LinkedIn and a lot of these other tools, and now
we’re about to expand." Will Social Marketing become a major player in
the way a large percentage of people buy products? That remains to be
seen and the odds are not great, but don’t count out this very
interesting possibility.
