As you scroll through Instagram, you are keeping up with the news of the day and the activities of your friends. Somewhere in the middle, you stumble across a sponsored post from a clothing company with a model sporting a jumper that you immediately recognize as the ideal fall wardrobe staple.

Fortunately, the picture has a “View Products” tag that leads to a product page with the sweater’s price and specifications. You choose your size, click “Buy Now,” and finish the app purchase in just a few clicks. Without pausing for breath, you resume scrolling through your stream.

You might not have realized it, but you just saw social commerce in action.

What is Social Commerce?

Let’s start by defining what social commerce is not.

It’s not about generating traffic to your website by promoting your products on social media.

Instead, social media is now used for the full shopping experience, which is known as modern social commerce. In other words, a social commerce strategy aims to make your products—or your entire catalog—available to customers through their preferred social media platform.

Let’s check out a common social commerce purchasing scenario:

• A customer opens their preferred social media platform.
• The customer discovers your product and learns about its capabilities while they are still in the app via postings, stories, videos, and other interactive features.
• Without ever leaving the app, the customer then purchases the product they want.

Clicks, shares, and likes can be used to gauge your audience, but income and engagement metrics are what truly define social commerce. Your potential profit increases with your in-app product sales performance.

Top Social Commerce Platforms

While Facebook and Instagram are at the forefront of social commerce features, other social media platforms including Pinterest, TikTok, and even Snapchat are also enhancing their portfolios. Every platform has a distinct function and draws a certain audience, therefore each one has comparative advantages that influence how it approaches social commerce.

We’ll examine the key traits of the top social commerce platforms in this article so you can pick the one that works best for your business.

1.     Instagram

Instagram is undoubtedly one of the most promising social commerce platforms, with 1 billion active users and a 70% rate of product discovery.

Instagram is the perfect platform for showcasing glossy marketing graphics because of its attention-grabbing photos, stories, and videos. So why not put your product front and center and convert that interaction into purchases if your customers are already engaging with your content?

A Facebook business profile, which connects your Facebook Shop to Instagram, is all you need to set up Instagram Shopping. After that, you may upload a product catalog and start giving each item a product tag, it’s that simple.

2.   Facebook

With roughly 3.45 billion monthly active users in 2021, it goes without saying that the 17-year-old platform has enormous potential for expanding globally and harnessing new audiences.

Facebook Shops, which were introduced in 2020 during the pandemic, assisted small and medium-sized companies in making the move online and creating shoppable storefronts. Facebook Shops are not only mobile-friendly and cost-free, but they are also completely customizable and let you upload a current product catalog or create a new one on the website.

Once they’ve found your page and products, Facebook does the work of personalizing the customer experience by showcasing products based on the shopper’s distinct preferences and search history.

3.   TikTok

TikTok is a newcomer to the social commerce scene but is quickly becoming much more than just a platform for sharing quick videos. TikTok has evolved into a social commerce platform worth noticing with the addition of shoppable posts, live-stream shopping features, and influencer marketing potential.

The term “TikTok made me buy it” was all too frequent even before the platform’s 2020 debut of its TikTok For Business function. TikTok has the power to make your company known to millions of new prospective customers thanks to its extraordinary capacity to instantly make less well-known people — and now brands — go viral.

Ending Thoughts

Social commerce is an inevitable solution to online shopping. As more individuals spend time online and ask friends for advice before making purchases, more businesses will benefit from what these networks have to offer. This does not imply that every internet retailer should engage in social commerce. It costs money to set up a sales platform on any network. But it is something to think about. It’s clear how well-liked it already is, and experts predict that its popularity will skyrocket soon.