IT-savvy people of the early third millennium live two lives – physical in the real world and virtual in the digital one. A social media account has become a must for people who want to be a part of the global community in various domains, such as work, education, entertainment, traveling, etc.
Online trade keeps up with the pace, witnessing a spike in the number of social shoppers that increased by 10 million between 2021 and 2023 in the US alone, reaching an astonishing 107 million. At least 5% of Americans buy on social media every day, and almost three times that figure every month.
Naturally, ecommerce players with big-time aspirations can’t ignore social media, whose role as the top marketing channel is evident.
For Magento store owners, social media marketing should become a crucial element of their omnichannel strategy that aims to reach out to the clientele via multiple touchpoints. What boons do ecommerce companies get by emphasizing social media in their business approach?
Benefits of Social Commerce Scrutinized
Having provided ecommerce consulting services for over 14 years, we are well aware of the advantages online traders get from embracing social commerce.
Increasing Traffic
Just look at the numbers of social media users!
For them, such platforms are the chief source of information about the world. If you manage to step up your brand’s presence on the most popular social networks, millions of people are likely to discover it.
Thus, you receive an excellent opportunity to attract traffic to your ecommerce site, generate more leads, and guide them down the sales funnel, turning them from one-time shoppers into loyal customers.
Building rapport with potential clients
Social networks are a second-to-none tool for establishing and maintaining an interaction channel with consumers worldwide. Such an interaction isn’t limited to providing information about your product roster and fortes of your goods.
Seller-buyer communication must be a two-way street where entrepreneurs learn a lot from customer comments, reviews, and recommendations. You should consider their feedback as a collection of valuable insights to modify and improve your business approaches and selling methods.
Fostering brand awareness of your company/products
When you keep a vibrant presence on social media, people will not only know more about your company and its products. If they are satisfied with the quality of the goods and cooperation with your e-store, they will recommend you to their family, friends, and colleagues.
In this way, your customers will become your brand’s advocates who will attract prospective buyers in droves since people are more likely to act on advice from their near and dear ones than listen to the opinions of strangers, to say nothing of ads.
To make the most of these perks, you should know how to leverage social media for your Magento store.
The Best Practices of Social Commerce for a Magento Store
What should you pay attention to while mapping out a social commerce strategy for your Magento website?
Enablement is the key
As vetted mavens in Magento development, we are sorry to tell you that no current platform version has built-in mechanisms for integrating social media features. That is why the only way you can do it is to utilize extensions, the most important of which are Inspiration Wall, Faves, and Live Feed.
Alongside these vendor-launched products, there exist numerous third-party add-ons that tackle certain aspects of social media enablement, such as social login, social share, social comments on Facebook , social stores, or social marketing.
Content reigns supreme
Providing relevant and engaging content was one of the top social commerce concerns for online vendors in 2022, and it is sure to remain that nowadays and beyond.
First of all, you should pick the right content format and prioritize videos. Of course, it doesn’t mean you should neglect other content types.
On the contrary, try several of them and see which one(s) your audience prefers.
Second of all, you should come to grips with the type of content to present to the public. As content marketers claim, it should be funny, authentic, relatable, and interactive.
Naturally, it must be relevant to what you have to offer them. But you shouldn’t only inform people about the products currently available at your e-store. You can also create demand for your upcoming products and thus promote them even before they hit the market.
Employ advertisement
You can integrate your Magento store with social media using native solutions such as Meta Business, or you can choose between several social media integration plugins and extensions for every taste, depending on your context, giving you several options for attracting traffic.
But there are a few things to keep in mind. When placing an ad on social networks, you should consider the following four aspects.
Goals and objectives. You should realize what you are going to achieve by advertising your online store and its products.
The aim that you set (reaching out to a certain number of consumers a month, increasing sales by some percentage, or boosting brand awareness) conditions the size of the campaign budget, the choice of ad content, success measurement metrics, etc.
Audience. The specifics of different social media platforms allow you to hone in on a particular group of people united by a common age, location, occupation, interests, and behavior patterns.
Thus, you will focus your efforts only on those who are likely to buy from you instead of wasting your time and money on all and sundry and eventually engaging no one.
Ad format. The right combination of textual and visual ad elements means to rivet the audience’s attention and engage in a meaningful way.
You may choose a simple image, a carousel ad, or another advertisement type, depending on whether you go for quick engagement or for relating an elaborate story.
Bidding and budgeting. You should thoroughly calculate the amount you are ready to fork out on the ad and the campaign’s efficiency. This way, you will ensure sufficient visibility without paying for it through the nose.
In social media advertisements, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for success. You should experiment and review the results before you understand what works better for you. But what is mission-critical is to make sure your ads direct social media users to your store.
Prioritize user engagement
Every move you make in your social media marketing endeavors should have one ultimate purpose in view: user satisfaction. To reach this goal, you should optimize every content piece (such as blog articles, product descriptions, etc.) for social networks.
Also, you should monitor feedback on your social media posts and react to it. In this way, you will show the users that their opinions matter and nurture relationships with them. As a result, they will be encouraged to continue communicating with you and share your content.
As you see, social commerce is a tough row to hoe, both because of technological challenges and business nuances that should be considered. To maximize the value of your social commerce initiatives, it is wise to entrust the task to qualified professionals in this domain.
Seasoned specialists of the Adobe commerce development agency have the necessary skills and experience in integrating social media with Magento websites and assisting with developing a comprehensive social commerce strategy for e-stores.
Dunbar Circles, Dyson Sphere, and Framingham Heart Study
And now, let’s gather all the disparate elements into one coherent and cohesive picture. The most common abstract explaining the fundamental difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing is the difference between chain and sphere, multiplicity, and ubiquity.
Do you want to know where the fundamental difference and the paradigm shift are? We live in a world of excess and abundance.
The amount of information attacking our brains, the number of marketing segments (target audience persons) that the average urbanized earthling falls into, and the number of businesses competing for the digital glow of our attention in an attempt to monetize it – simply cannot be comprehended.
Every business today faces the dilemma of adapting to the inevitable.
The bigger the market, the more consumers; the higher the level of services; the bigger the range, the wider the choice; the more of this, more of that, more of this, more of that, more of this, more of that – adding new things will not win the race.
Omnichannel marketing does not multiply new entities but unites overlapping planes of interaction between the consumer and the brand.
An individual, point approach to customers based on large databases, taking into account all touchpoints of a person and a brand, is what will allow you to unobtrusively build your multi-faceted “presence” in the perception of your audience.
Omnichannel allows you to not only “touch” and “embrace the consumer, but fundamentally alter the approach to positioning.
No matter how attractive the billboard design was, or how catchy the slogan was, only the one who can link all these elements together will take a place in the consumer’s mind.
In a world of abundance, people choose convenience. In a world of endless novelty, they prefer intuitive and familiar. In a world of competing businesses – they lean towards the ones appealing to their values.
In a world of brands bombarding them with advertising, tirelessly exhausting the scarce attention that we have – they will choose not the louder one, but the one that will seep into the voids of perception like water.
Every shortcoming of your competitors, every plane of the digital world where the user dwells outside other people’s content strategies, and advertising campaigns – your legitimate target, another facet of your omnichannel marketing approach.
Let me offer three enlightening and insightful concepts, completely unrelated to marketing, that will paradoxically help you capture the essence.
Humans are ultra-cooperative social animals interacting with their kind according to the degree of kinship and belonging to a certain “tribe” or group.
We live with an eye on others and consume with an eye on others. The model of our social strata resembles a planetary one – all our contacts revolve around us in different overlapping orbits, some closer, some farther away.
The closer the circle –, the fewer individuals in it, and the higher the gravity –, the more valuable and meaningful they are to us. Primatologist Robin Dunbar has pointed out that groups of primates have a certain limit, after which the pack splits into two and expands territorially.
These social “orbits” — family, friends, close acquaintances, clubmates, colleagues, neighbors — are Dunbar’s “circles.”
And the “Dunbar number” (about 150) is the number of really significant individuals who “belong” in our minds.
Our environment is our pack, our reference group. Every marketer’s dream is to slip into the sphere of trust of an entire family of consumers. The old “bull by the horns” direct selling approach is outdated.
The future belongs to a trusted, informed, and reciprocal relationship (not a trinket at the checkout, but a satisfied relative who trusted the brand on your recommendation and is satisfied) between the business and the end user.
Social circles, primatology, Dunbar’s number. It’s not complicated.
The second concept is the Framingham Heart Study. Obesity is “transmitted” through social networks. Environment determines communication; communication determines consciousness, and consciousness determines lifestyle.
Twelve thousand sixty-seven people were assessed over 32 years, which is enough for a statistic.
A person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if They had a friend who became obese. If one sibling becomes obese, the others have a 40% increased chance of becoming obese.
If one spouse becomes obese, the likelihood that the other spouse will join them grows by 37%. We live with an eye on each other; we’re ultra-social.
The third concept is the Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical megastructure, a shell built by humans around a star to collect its radiation energy.
It is speculative science fiction theorizing where we will get our energy from when the history of humanity in the solar system becomes the subject of study for generations of our distant descendants.
Each of us is a star that radiates its attention. Attention is converted into trust. Trust could be converted into bilateral communication.
Communication enables interactions. Omnichannel marketing powered by Magento platform will help you not only to build a sphere of touch points around the consumer but to gain access to their “Dunbar circles,” allowing you to operate their perception not in the language of advertising but in the language of their reference group – their content, recommendations, feedback.
Loyalty and trust have no price. They bring people from the circles of those who have given you trust.
Bottom Line
Contemporary social networks wield enormous power by providing a robust platform for communication, education, entertainment, and shopping.
Given the number of active social media users, e-commerce entrepreneurs tap this huge pool of potential customers to increase their website traffic, keep in touch with prospective buyers, and foster brand awareness among them.
Magento e-store owners can make the most of social commerce by leveraging extensions for social media enablement, offering engaging and interactive content, wisely employing advertisement, and focusing on user engagement.
They can maximize these efforts by enlisting the assistance of qualified specialists in IT and business.
