Although it seems like it, social commerce isn’t new. What is new is the expansion and mainstreaming of social media over the last couple years, spawning an expanded range of social commerce tools and opportunities. Social commerce examples have been made possible by new social media technologies that link social media platforms to e-commerce platforms. Services such as Facebook Connect and Google’s FriendConnect allow visitors to login to e-commerce sites with their social networking accounts and communicate directly with their social networks whilst on those sites. In essence social commerce comes down to: helping people connect where they buy and buy where they connect (Marsden, 2014).
As Rigby explains, what we are seeing today is only the beginning. Soon it will be hard even to define e-commerce, let alone measure it. Meanwhile, traditional retailers are lagging badly. One of the reasons they are lagging badly is because they are more comfortable with incremental improvements. Retailers think that their customers will always be there. But they’re not and online players are gaining so existing retailers need to pick up the pace of change, before it’s too late (Rigby, 2011).
Zhu, Benbasat and Jiang conducted a research about shopping online together. Their study explored the topic of collaborative online shopping. Nora Ganim Barnes also states that shopping always has been considered a social activity, but when combined with likes, follows and pins of social media platforms and the proliferation of smartphones, shopping has been streamlined. This evolution of social media is the reason why social commerce exists nowadays. Katz and Lazarsfeld claimed that personal influence has more effect than media because it consists of active communication rather than one-way promotion. The essence of ‘’word of mouth’’ is its personal influence over others in their decision-making: people tend to gather opinions from sources they find credible or knowledgeable (Haywood, 1989). Consumers now have the opportunity to express their support for products and services through Facebook ‘’likes’’, ‘’follows’’ or retweets on Twitter or they ‘’pin’’ things on Pinterest. Now there is some evidence that these likes, follows or pins lead to purchases through these social networking sites (Nora Ganim Barnes, 2014). Nora Ganim Barnes researched whether the ‘’Fortune 500’’ corporations had a Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram and Foursquare account. Foursquare, Instagram and Google+ were included for the first time in 2014 and debuted with respectable numbers. All other platforms showed an increase in adoption. These 500 corporations appear to have taken note of the significant new marketing opportunities as a result of the abundance of consumer-generated content. Usually these business giants influences other businesses. If they do so, then social commerce is destined to be the next big trend.
Sources:
Marsden, P. 2010. Social commerce: Monetizing social media. Syzygy Group. White Paper
Rigby, D. 2011. The future of shopping. Harvard Business Review 89(12) 64-75.
Zhu, L., Benbasat, I., and Jiang, Z. 2010. Let’s shop online together: An Empirical investigation of collaborative online shopping support. Information Systems Research 21(4) 872-891.
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