Introduction
Recent emerging trends have evolved social media into a commercial platform. Earlier social media provided opportunities for user attraction and engagement through marketing.

Nowadays the dynamic and vivid demands of consumers have made social media platforms to integrate commercial opportunities that gave rise to the term Social Commerce.

What is Social Commerce?

Social commerce as the name suggests is the use of social media networks for selling and not just for marketing. Social media is mainly the point of inspiration for consumers to buy products but with social commerce, you bring the point of sale to point of inspiration.

Social commerce provides a unified shopping experience through browsing, exploring, sharing, evaluation, and SHOPPING over social media networks.

In this digitally competitive world, the most challenging part is to get the consumer to engage with your brand rather than selling. With an effective social commerce strategy, you can fulfill both the purpose through a single channel.

We have formed some steps to guide you about how you can formulate a successful social commerce strategy.

6 Steps to Build a Successful Social Commerce Strategy

1)Social Media Selection Strategy
The first step here is to know the right social media platforms that suit your brand personality, product portfolio, and availability of interested audiences for social shopping.

You don’t need to have a social commerce strategy for all social networks just because there are multiple social media platforms and all have a huge user base.

Every social media has its own unique selling proposition so you need to
find the right fit for your needs. The aesthetics of your chosen social media platform(s) should align with your brand aesthetics for maximum positive results.

For example – If you are a fashion retailer, Twitter might not be the best choice for your social commerce strategy; instead, Instagram, Facebook, & Pinterest might bring better results for you.

2) Develop S.M.A.R.T Objectives

S.M.A.R.T is an abbreviation that stands for:
● Specific
● Measurable
● Attainable
● Relevant
● Time-Bound

If you don’t have an objective or goal that you want to achieve in your mind then any amount of investments or strategies won’t be able to get you results.

Identify what you want to achieve from your social commerce strategy and it should be specific, not vague. Also, it should be measurable so that you can create a more meaningful and performance-based strategy.

The objective should resonate with your brand identity and efforts. Also, you should be able to achieve the given objective and that too in a specific time period.

3) Aggregate Engaging Content
The most crucial element of any strategy relating to social media the quality of content that you will use in the campaign.

Content is what you will showcase to the users in different forms like Images, videos, or text as your social commerce strategy. If the content won’t be engaging or interactive to the users it will cause disinterest that will lead to no further engagement and eventually no selling.

You can create content on interesting or trending social topics that can garner a vast audience.

Besides, you can also aggregate user-generated content from social media to make it a part of your campaign for increased effectivity & influence. This will also help you build social proof along with conversions.

4) Make Use of Consumer Insights
There are various tools available out there like Google analytics that can help you gain insights into social media users and their social behavior.

Once you gain insights into what consumers are looking for, their search keywords, social hashtags used, clicks, shares, likes, comments, commercial activities on social media, and more such details.

You can then form a more refined and detailed-oriented strategy that can bring maximum possible returns on minimum investments. These insights will help you bring in more targeted and personalized elements into your strategy.

This is essential in social media as personalized promotion is highly effective in increasing engagement & conversions.

5) Streamlined Checkout Process
We have focused on the social part of social commerce but the biggest issue that arises is in the eCommerce purchase funnel that leads to cart abandonment and bounce rate.

If you are using social media for commercial activities then it is essential that you make the checkout process as easy, quick, and short as possible so that the user won’t have to waste much time.

Reducing the clicks, webpage redirection, and ultimately easy checkout will help in increasing conversions and sales.

Before forming your social commerce strategy, you should test your checkout process to find out any flaws or issues that can be improved so that it does not affect the real customers.

Conclusion
If you design your social commerce strategy after a comprehensive review and implementation of these 5 steps, you will have more opportunities to achieve your intended goals and objectives.

Social commerce is more than social media marketing, here you are selling along with the usual marketing and one mistake can cost you many customers in the long-run.

If you do it appropriately, social commerce will immensely help you build your brand image, revenue generation, social proof, customer loyalty, and distinct brand identity.

About the Author

Author Name: Alice Herman

Author Bio: I’m Alice Herman and I’m a digital marketer and technical writer. I’m passionate about exploring and writing about innovation, technology, and digital marketing trends.

Author Twitter Handle: @AliceHerman_usa