Social net­work­ing sites were the stars of the 2011 IRCE event. Social shop­ping is grow­ing and com­pa­nies are tak­ing an inter­est in these com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels to bring them closer to the cus­tomer. Twit­ter and Face­book are the win­ning duo in social shop­ping: these two names spring to mind at the mere men­tion of e-commerce, social com­merce is on the up…

But what exactly is social com­merce? We’ve heard a lot about it with­out really know­ing what it is. Social com­merce, or social shop­ping, means turn­ing your cus­tomers into ambas­sadors for your brand on social net­work­ing sites like Face­book, Twit­ter, FourSquare etc.

There are many forms of social com­merce from hav­ing “Like” or “Tweet” but­tons on your prod­uct pages to more elab­o­rate ideas such as dis­counts for vis­i­tors who share your prod­ucts on their networks.

Social shop­ping also takes the form of book­mark­ing sites where users post their pur­chases online and ask what other vis­i­tors think of them.

E-commerce busi­nesses have to get in on social commerce

At IRCE 2011 there were sev­eral con­fer­ences about social com­merce and major Amer­i­can com­pa­nies gave the audi­ences some great advice.

Dur­ing the Inno­v­a­tive Ways to Make Social Net­work­ing Work for You con­fer­ence, Alaa Has­san, Gen­eral Man­ager of iNetVideo (14 mil­lion dol­lar turnover in 2010) said: « Stop sell­ing and start find­ing ways to make peo­ple want to buy from you. ».

He doesn’t mean that online shops should stop think­ing about their sales; he means that they should start using Face­book, Twit­ter, blogs and other net­works to make their cus­tomers loyal to their brand , instead of count­ing on flash sales as they only attract cus­tomers in the short term or per­haps even just for one visit. Often a company’s pres­ence on social net­work­ing sites is a way of quickly assess­ing the customer’s reac­tion to the prod­ucts (what they like, what they don’t like etc.)

The con­fer­ence high­lighted Vision Retailer Inc., a com­pany that man­ages sev­eral shoe e-commerce web­sites, and gives cus­tomers the chance to “love” or “hate” prod­ucts on Supershoes.com. Vice Pres­i­dent Frank Mals­ben­den said: “Once you’ve got your vis­i­tors’ atten­tion, you’ve got demand.” The site also added a live feed to show which prod­ucts vis­i­tors were view­ing in real time. This idea sparks inter­est and makes prod­ucts into must-haves.

Whilst many com­pa­nies pre­pare to launch on Face­book and Twit­ter, Alaa Has­san reminded us of the impor­tance of blog­ging as a great con­nec­tion between the com­pany and cus­tomer as well as an excel­lent way to improve the site’s ranking.

Online shop­pers use social media as a major source of infor­ma­tion (sec­ond only to search engines). Google and Bing rank their search results based on whether or not a link has been shared. They also con­sider the num­ber of fans a brand has to cal­cu­late the website’s page ranking

Count on social net­work­ing sites to improve brand vis­i­bil­ity: « If you count the num­ber of times you’ve gone online to look for a prod­uct, infor­ma­tion or get news about your friends on Face­book, you’ll realise the poten­tial mar­ket is huge » says Cather­ine Paschke­witz, Hewlett Packard Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing Man­ager (over 1.5 bil­lion dol­lars turnover last year).

30,000 fans on Face­book? Why not!

Sev­eral of PrestaShop’s 80,000 bou­tiques are already suc­cess­fully involved in social shop­ping. Archiduchesse, a web­site sell­ing socks, already has a 10,000 strong online community, Faguo Shoes have 26,000 fans, Timefy and its watch col­lec­tion have 9,000 members, Eleven Paris, an up and com­ing prêt-à-porter brand has over 20,000 fash­ion vic­tims etc. Also, Michel et Augustin, a well-known food brand dis­trib­ut­ing in a dozen coun­tries, had over30,000 fans before even launch­ing into the world of e-commerce: the per­fect plat­form for any e-commerce com­pany…

Social mar­ket­ing is the future for online mer­chants no mat­ter how big or small.

To help you get the most out of social commerce’s fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ties and build a real com­mu­nity around your brand, PrestaShop has sev­eral mod­ules for you to use and con­nect your shop to Face­book, Twit­ter and Youtube to name but a few

Put your lat­est tweets on your web­site to pro­mote your pro­file, broad­cast your lat­est news and turn vis­i­tors into fol­low­ers with our Flux Twit­ter mod­ule, designed by our team!

Give each new fan of your brand a dis­count coupon with Face­book Fan Coupon! Find out how this brand new mod­ule can increase the size of your online community.

There are also sev­eral other mod­ules for Face­book to choose from: get fans together and encour­age them to com­ment on your prod­ucts or share them with their friends. Check out Fan Club Facebook, Facebook Com­ments, and Face­book PS Shoptab… to name but a few!

Note : For any type of Prestashop Devel­op­ment Hire Prestashop Devel­oper from Us