How to Maximize Your Social Commerce Strategy: A Guide for Businesses

All the details on what social commerce is, how to approach it with your brand, and the best ways (and worst ways!) to use social commerce for your biz.

Posted 2 months ago

Written by

Mackenzie Taylor

Posted 2 months ago

Congrats! You’ve started your own business and now you’re about to put your baby out into the world for people to buy—but how in the world should you do it? Well, obviously you need to be online and, most specifically, you need to be on social media. Social commerce is one of the most effective ways for a brand to sell its items online and reach a whole new audience that you might not have been able to reach previously.

In today’s blog, we’re going to give you all the dirty details on what social commerce is, how to approach it with your brand, and the best ways (and worst ways!) to use social commerce for your biz.

Jump to a section ✨

What is social commerce?
What’s the difference between social commerce and eCommerce?
What are the best social media platforms for promoting products?
What are the benefits of using social commerce?
Tips and tools you need for effective social commerce

What is social commerce?

Social commerce is where a business buys and sells its products or services on social media. Back in the good ol’ days of 2005, Yahoo! (Yes, Yahoo!) invented the phrase as a way for businesses to promote and sell their products directly on social media platforms.

How do people sell on social media? In a variety of ways! You can do stoppable posts, chatbot shopping, social media storefronts, and so much more.

The biggest reason why a brand or business does this is to help streamline the process for their customers and make shopping a much more engaging and user-friendly experience.

Seriously, taking away the hassle of online shopping is HUGE, and the easier you make it (and the fewer clicks your customers have to do) means big sales and big $$$ for you!

There are even a few apps that have built-in social commerce features already like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok.

Think of it like this: You’re scrolling through Instagram and see a super cute dress that instantly grabs your attention (this is me every single day). With social commerce, that cute dress can instantly be mine if the brand added a “buy now” button on the post that links directly to their commerce shop.

This eliminates the hassle of trying to find the dress on their website and feeds that need instant gratification—which will help you with sales.

Figuring out your social commerce strategy is going to be huge in 2024 and we’re going to teach you how to do exactly that.

What’s the difference between social commerce and eCommerce?

Yes, while both are all about selling your products online, social commerce and eCommerce are two very different things.

eCommerce is buying and selling your services using the internet as a whole. Mainly by consumer-based sites (think: Amazon) and/or through your website that you sell to consumers.

While social commerce is a type of eCommerce you only use social media platforms to sell and promote your products and services.

The biggest difference between the two is how your customer finds and purchases your products and services. With eCommerce, your customer is cruising around the internet and, typically, trying to find something specific to buy. Stumbles across your item and purchases. Effective e-commerce website design can significantly impact a customer’s purchasing decision, so optimizing the user interface and enhancing the overall shopping experience is crucial for boosting sales.

With social commerce, it’s a much more interactive experience. A customer will be scrolling their feed and might stumble across someone who uses your product, gets curious, and heads to your social media profile to learn more. From there, they could decide to go to your social commerce page or scroll to discover more about you and your biz.

Social commerce is ALL about interacting, liking, sharing, commenting, and more before clicking the “buy now” button.

What are the best social media platforms for promoting products?

While there are lots of social media platforms out there, which ones are going to be the ones that will help you effectively sell your products online? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

Here are the top social sites you need to be on if you want to sell on social commerce:

Facebook

A big one. A huge one. The biggest, most hugest one! Facebook allows you to create a Facebook Shop to sell all of your items through the platform.

With your Facebook Business Page, set up a Facebook Shop that you can completely make your own. Customize it with collections of your product or services, add images, use your brand font and color, connect it to your eCommerce website design (if you have one), and if you need help with setup or customization, consider working with an e-commerce development company to ensure everything runs smoothly and looks professional.

Your Facebook Shop will be available from your Facebook page, your Instagram page, Facebook and Instagram shopping ads, Facebook and Instagram Shoppable stories and posts, and more.

Once your customers decide to click “shop now,” they won’t leave the app and instead, be directed to shop inside the app. Or, you can send them to your website if that’s something you prefer.

Instagram

If you decide to put your business on Facebook, you can instantly add it to Instagram. As both the platforms are owned by Meta, Instagram Shopping is linked to your Facebook Shop.

To create an Instagram Shop, you need to head to your Facebook Business page and make sure everything is set up correctly on your Facebook Shop.

Once that is completed, you can start tagging your products on your posts and inside of your Stories for your customers to click instantly and shop.

Pinterest has made it incredibly easy for people to quickly shop Pins on their website. All you have to do as a small business is add your products to a catalog on your Pinterest Business page.

From there, you can start tagging all of your products on any images or videos you upload so people can then click the tag and learn more and shop for the product.

Pinterest Shopping doesn’t have an internal commerce page, instead, it goes to whatever website you’ve linked to your products—still making it a lot simpler for your customer to shop.

Snapchat

A platform a lot of people forget about when it comes to social commerce is Snapchat. The platform has Brand Profiles where you can add a “Native Store” within the app that people can scroll and purchase from.

All you have to do is make sure you have a business Snapchat account (this is really easy to create!) and from there, you can connect your shop (if it’s on Shopify!).

Your customers can then see your shop and start shopping right away.

TikTok

TikTok Shop has officially taken over the TikTok platform—and if you’re looking to sell your products through social media, TikTok is one you’ll want to be part of.

Easily add your products and services inside TikTok Shop and your audience will easily be able to shop the items all within the app.

Like Instagram and Facebook, there are a few different ways for your audience to be able to shop on TikTok, like Lives, product showcase tab, and in-feed videos.

One of the best ways to use TikTok Shop is by implementing creators to help you sell your product. Creators can talk about your product, and link your shop via an affiliate link. This helps you sell, plus gets the creator $$ as well.

What are the benefits of using social commerce?

Still unsure why you should start selling on social media? Interesting stance, but let me give you some reasons why it can be beneficial to you:

Directly engage with customers

With social commerce, you can directly interact with your core customers. By engaging with your customers, you will have a better chance of increasing your brand loyalty, build a lead list, and better retain your customers. Using social commerce will allow you to speak to your customers in real time and answer any questions or respond to any issues immediately.

Larger audience

Social media platforms have millions, sometimes billions of active users, and those are all users that have the potential to be customers of yours! By being on social media, you can start connecting with people all over the world and building up a bigger base of customers just by showing up, engaging, and having a good social commerce strategy in place.

Social proof

Buying online can be hard for some people because how are you supposed to know if it actually looks the same IRL like it does online? Social commerce can help eliminate that concern by having social proof directly from your customers. Your customers can review and post all about your brand and provide insight into future customers about your product.

Customer data

I know, I know. People seem to shudder at the word “data” but by having social commerce, you can gather important data from your potential customers for future marketing campaigns. Data you can gather from your audience are things like user interactions, engagement, behavior, preferences, buying patterns, and so much more.

Cost-effective marketing solution

Traditional marketing can be super expensive if you’re not careful. And honestly, it can be restrictive to those who have never done marketing before. With social commerce, anyone can easily post on their page to spread awareness of their products. And the cost of entry to buying an ad is pretty inexpensive as well if you feel like putting money behind some of your posts.

Tips and tools you need for effective social commerce

Are you all setup and ready to go? Here are our top tips and tools to help you make the most out of your digital shop.

Streamline sales and marketing with AI

AI is the current talk of the town for good reason! You can easily streamline all of your sales and marketing with an effective AI tool.

A tool like Flick’s AI Assistant will allow you to add your products and services within the app. The AI Assistant will then use that information to create content and caption ideas, graphics, carousel posts, and more—ALL IN YOUR BRAND VOICE.

You’ll be able to stay consistent with your marketing and increase your sales, while also building other aspects of your brand elsewhere.

Flick’s tip: Want to try Flick for yourself and see what we’re talking about? Get a FREE 7-day trial and access to our AI Assistant to help you create all the content and captions for your social media in seconds.

Engage with your followers

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it thousands of times—engage with your following! While it’s so easy to post and forget, you shouldn’t do this.

Building your community online is incredibly important if you want to sell. Answer questions, provide valuable content, speak to your audience like you’re a real person (because you are a real person!), and help your audience through the buying journey.

Ask for reviews

Remember when I talked about social proof above? This is that social proof. Ask your audience to review your products and let others know what they thought of it. Better yet, ask your audience to create a video or other user-generated content that you can share on your feed!

Ready to start selling your items on social? You’ve got the guide to get started, now it’s time to actually do it. Learn how to create engaging content on social media to lure your audience in every time.