FreshNetworks Blog

Making purchases directly from within Facebook (a form of social commerce) has the potential to make the social network a place where we spend not just considerable amounts of our time, but also our money.

Social Media Influence has created this infographic which reflects on the past two years of Facebook commerce (known as “F-commerce“).

From the very first purchase ($34 worth of flowers) through to movie rentals and mobile phone credit purchases, F-commerce already has a varied history, and this is just the beginning.

Some key points of interest:

• 67% of shoppers spend more when they have received a recommendation from their online community of friends.
• Just 11% of the surveyed UK customers have bought something from Facebook.
• Only 8% of retailer Facebook pages are able to accept transactions.
• Predicted value of social commerce is set to reach $30bn worldwide by 2015.

Today I attended an event hosted by WOMMA UK which covered the ways that word of mouth is impacting search and looked at how search and social media are overlapping more and more.

Search and social are becoming increasingly intertwined, especially with the arrival of Google+, a clear indication of the search giant’s intention to further develop and improve the social nature of search results.

There are several important areas brands should consider when thinking about how word of mouth affects their performance on search engines. Here are three areas that brands should keep in mind when looking at their social and search strategies:

1. Word of mouth drives search traffic – be ready

• People that “hear” about your brand (online, face to face, or otherwise) will want to search for you, for convenience, for education and for learning about new opinions. This means you need to cater for all the various different ways people will search for your brand and cover all the possibilities that  misspellings or misperceptions may cause.
• “Reviews” is a very popular search term, so hosting these on your own site is a great way to generate authenticity and long-tail search terms.

2. Social and your online reputation

• Consider the implications for reputation management. Is “scam” a prominent result on the suggestions for your brand in Google? Nobody wants to see that, but instead of covering it up, ask yourself why this is such a dominant sentiment. Maybe there is a miscommunication and customers are not fully informed as to what your provide? Treat this as an opportunity to intercede and communicate.
• You can be proactive by using third party sites such as Yahoo! Answers, which generally ranks well and gives you a neutral platform to respond to negative sentiment.

3. Conversions and social media

• Retailers – price is no longer a USP. Your customers will be seeking deep content, such as user reviews and friend’s recommendations. It is important for users to trust your site, or they will go elsewhere to research and/or purchase.
• Remember that peoples’ decision making can be rational, but is predominantly emotional. Having social recommendations appear in search results and on page will appease the latter.

We’ve already talked about how Arla foods brand Lurpack is using social media to share good food and now it seems that another Arla brand, Cravendale, is using social media as a way of increasing brand awareness.

Cravendale, the UK’s number one branded fresh milk, will be giving away 200 bottles of milk every Friday from 1st July until October in what’s being termed “Free Milk Friday”.

Each week 100 Cravendale Facebook fans and 100 @Cravendale Twitter followers are in with a chance of winning a free one-litre carton of Cravendale milk.

To take part in Free Milk Friday Twitter followers need to wait for a competiton related tweet to be issued on a Friday morning and to then retweet it, with winners selected at random.

To enter on Facebook, Cravendale’s Facebook page will show a special ‘tab’ every Friday and the first 100 fans to click on it to be given a voucher for free milk.

The campaign seems to be about extending reach, as well as perhaps helping Cravendale brand managers hit their sample targets, and it will be interesting to see if  if Cravendale has thought about how they’re going to aqcuire new likes and retweets over time as the campaign is set to run for 3 months.

Even more interesting will be what, if anything, they do to retain the interest of any new fans and followers once the campaign is over.

Yesterday I attended an email marketing roundtable hosted by Econsultancy. Having a social media agency’s perspective gave me a good opportunity to learn how email marketers currently view social media, as the new communication channel was discussed frequently.

Email has a well established track record of delivering ROI, whereas discussions continue in terms of social media’s value. However, information offered by Econsultancy and Adestra from their 2011 email marketing industry census suggests that there are opportunities for the two channels to integrate further:

• 72% of the companies surveyed by Econsultancy did not measure how email marketing impacted social media activity (just 1% responded that they use sophisticated measurement)
• At present under a quarter of companies (23%) say their email is currently well integrated with CRM data.The future of email will involve further development of integration with web analytics and social media data.

In addition to Econsultancy’s findings, interesting opinions and findings were shared in the discussion:

• The extremely personal nature of an inbox is significant, and email marketers have to offer something of value in order to maintain access to it.
• The proportion of emails that are opened on mobile devices varies from 2-20%, which tends to be affected by industry (publishing was cited as an example of the higher end) – as the number of people using mobile devices to access social media grows, perhaps we can expect further convergence of email and social messages in a mobile-optimised format.
• One suggestion is to use email to send a digest of a brand’s social media activity – offering a summary of the week’s most interesting blog posts, tweets and Facebook activity might catch the attention of people who do not have the time to constantly follow a variety of social channels, and might give a reminder to visit.

It is understandable that social media skeptics will hold email marketing close to their hearts – it has a solid history of delivering results, and is relatively simple to track – whereas the new kid on the block remains elusive in both these areas. In my opinion, social media and email are not mutually exclusive – those who learn to implement both in a strategic  and integrated manner will learn and communicate far more effectively than those who treat both channels separately.

image courtesy of shutterstock

Following on from the success of our social media monitoring tools review earlier this year, we’ve been testing  nine of the leading social media monitoring tools in order to assess how effective they are at identifying influencers.

We’ve tested Attensity 360, Brandwatch, Radian6, Alterian, Scoutlabs, Sysomos, Synthesio, PeerIndex and Social Radar using the subject  of  “organic baby food” as the test topic for our report.

We felt it would be interesting to see how well each of the tools could help identify influencers for this much-discussed topic. Will the tools pick out key “mummy bloggers” and frequently visited forum posts in parenting sites such as Mumsnet and BabyCentre?

Download our social media influencers report 2010 to find out

We’d like to thank all the tool providers for enabling us to carry out this report. We’d also like to  give a special mention the following people for their comments and opinions about influencers, which have been included in the report: Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, Murray Newlands, Louise Parker and Kelly Pennock.