5 Ways You’ve Missed Out On Sales Without Social Commerce

Dig you know that social commerce represents 5% off all ecommerce sales? Social traffic has dramatically increased over the past few years, with leading think tanks finding that growth has surpassed a whopping 300% since 2012 up into the present day.

Social sharing and purchases have spiked by over 9%, revenue has seen uplift that’s exceeded 18%, and referrals alone have generated over 200% more site traffic. From an SEO standpoint, over 90% of ecommerce stores now enjoy better rankings simply due to the Google algorithms that factor in the presence of social signals.

As it relates to the holiday shopping season, the most profitable time of the year for the ecommerce industry, a crowdtap poll found that 65% of people use social media and social searches to find gifts for their family and friends.

These statistics by themselves serve to illustrate the strong role that social media has in our lives today. So how can social media help your online store get more conversions today? Here are five ways that you are missing out.

Facebook is, by and far, the most popular social commerce channel out there, and one of the oldest, too. This social behemoth influences as much as 39.3% of all holiday purchases that are referred by social media, to give an accurate example of its might and muster.

Videos on Facebook generate over 1 billion views daily, explains a Marketing Land study. And comScore says that Facebook gets 1 billion more views than YouTube each month. By failing to advertise your product or brand on this social media channel, in particular by using video advertising, you are already missing out on a cash cow.

Shopping cart hosts like Shopify already offer direct integrations for Facebook ecommerce. With 53% of millennials relying on Facebook to find their next purchase, it’s easily the top contender in this industry.

Here are four more reasons why you should maintain a strong Facebook presence and be featuring your products and services on this social engine.

• Facebook also accounts for 64% of all US social media buy button referrals.
• 54% of consumers rely on Facebook to find out about new brands or learn about buying opportunities.
• 74% of US personal care brands maintain a strong presence on Facebook.
• 95% of US department store brands maintain a Facebook page.

The real proof in the pudding is the sheer dominance that Facebook has in regard to display ad impressions, as it relates to other top contenders. By and far, Facebook gets top billing, as is demonstrated in the chart we’ve included below.

While Facebook very well may be getting more video plays, Google’s YouTube service is still the reigning king of the video ad world. If you have not yet considered creating video ads for rotation on Google, you can add this entry to the list of times that you missed out on sales from social commerce.

According to a Business Insider report, 50 million people are now using their smartphones and tablets to watch video, accounting for 15% of all online video viewing hours. YouTube is growing in popularity with each passing day, with channels like Machinima attracting over 200 million viewers; as compared to major networks like HBO, which attracts just 30 million viewers.

But just how large a beast is YouTube anyways? Current statistics show that approximately one-fifth of all mobile internet traffic comes from YouTube, with a nice percentage of desktop traffic going its way, too.

• Over the past three years, YouTube has grown by 40% year-over-year, amassing hundreds of millions of hours watched and billions of views daily.
• YouTube’s partner advertising revenue has increased by 50% year-over-year.
• 95% of major advertisers also advertise on YouTube due to strong referral traffic.
• Rights holders have earned over $1 billion since the Content ID program was launched in 2007.

To further sweeten the pot, according to information that was culled by Sharaholic, YouTube has the healthiest referral traffic of all the social media giants. The report found that referral traffic from YouTube attracted the longest time spent on the referring site, and generated the highest amount of pages viewed with one of the lowest bounce rates, too.

Twitter is another commonly ignored social engine by e-retailers, but it really shouldn’t be. With over 1.3 billion active users, Twitter is one of the biggest players in the social media game, according to Expanded Ramblings. It routinely attracts over 120 million unique monthly visitors. Daily, over 100 million people are on the site, each with an average of 208 followers. Simply put, this is astounding for a micro-blogging engine.

As of 2014, Facebook was still commanding the lead by a large margin. But this does not mean that you should ignore the potential for strong sales and healthy referrals on Twitter, either.

Several reasons exist for this logic of thinking.

• Twitter ads cost less and can get you more clicks for fewer dollars spent as compared to Facebook ads.
• Twitter Cards offer a unique and interactive way to approach online ads, and differ from Facebook and other social engines.
• 68 industries await you with custom tailored analytics and rich demographics to choose from.
• Twitter is ranked in third place for most valuable referrals from social commerce traffic.
• Twitter users tend to remain highly active and are very responsive; they are always connected and updated via their mobile device.

A newer entrant in the social media gambit is Tumblr, a live blogging engine that was recently acquired by Yahoo! for $1 billion. If you have never heard of this website, make sure you take a look and check it out. It’s grown from being a relatively unheard of name to becoming one of the larger players in the social commerce industry.

But just how large is Tumblr, and why should you be concerned about missing on out sales from it? Here are a few candid reasons why.

• People spend 14 minutes longer on Tumblr than they do on Facebook or Twitter.

• 35% of people on Tumblr earn at least $50,000 per year.
• Tumblr has grown over 70% in the past three years, and continues to get bigger each year.
• Over 40 million of the site’s visitors monthly are based in the U.S.
• Tumblr is in the top-ten for most visited sites monthly in the U.S., receiving over 30 million visitors each month.
• More than 120,000 people sign-up for Tumblr each day.
• Over 900 posts go up on the site each second.

With virtually identical view rates between Tumblr and Facebook, it makes sense to consider this newer social engine for your advertising metrics. Back in 2015, Ad Week predicted that Tumblr ads would generate over $100 million that year alone.

The service offers a variety of ways that you can advertise your products, and also functions as a viable social bookmarking engine and re-blogging service. As such, it should be a viable part of your approach to social commerce.

Previous to this paragraph, we really let you have it as far as all of the times that you missed out on sales due to a lack of a presence or a lack of advertising on social media channels. But this time around, it’s actually in regard to your website. Of course, social media is still involved. We’re talking about sales that you have missed out on due to not offering a convenient social login for your customers.

A social login is a method that you integrate into your ecommerce site that allows visitors to create an account by logging in with their preferred social engine. Now you may be wondering just how preferred this method is, because some stores offer a guest checkout and others force you to fill out long forms just to complete a transaction.

Here’s the thing, the most current shopping cart abandonment rates hover around 65%. With the majority of people who visit your site already abandoning the shopping cart, the last thing that you want to do is make it more difficult for them to complete the transaction. With a social login, you appeal to over 70% of shoppers, who want a streamlined and easier, seamless shopping experience.

Offering a social login helps to reduce cart abandonment rates and improves your organic marketing by enabling you to more easily build your newsletter and email marketing list in tandem. Experts estimate that over $18 billion is lost each year simply due to cart abandonment, something that you can curb when you add a social login to your store.

As you can see from the chart above, most people prefer to login using their Facebook or Google accounts, with the remainder being scattered between various other social engines. Assuring that you have at least these two social logins present can help you decrease cart abandonment by making a simple update to your online store.

We leave you with this helpful infographic that can empower you to make a few simple changes so you can decrease cart abandonment and start getting the conversions you deserve.