The Social Commerce Journey "Social Commerce", a term introduced by Yahoo!, a subset of e-commerce where social media, and its platforms, are used in buying and selling products online. To best understand Social Commerce, it exists in six different levels; Social Sales Content, Social Advertising, e-Commerce in Social, Shop and Share, Social Currency, And Social Transacting. Social Sales Content: Any content that is published by a brand in order to promote products or services. Most of the content posted is there to grow the community through shared values and generating brand awareness, product selling can be incorporated subtly.
Social Advertising: This is the purchasing of advertising inventory within social media. Just like advertising we are used to, the purchaser buys the opportunity to appear in front of a specific audience.
e-Commerce within Social:
This is where social platforms have opted for users to directly shop on the platform itself, than the users leaving the social profiles to go shop on another site. Platforms such as Facebook have created a ‘Shopping Tab’, or Pages to have tabs with online stores built into them.
Shop and Share: An increasingly popular version of social commerce where brands are looking to activate commerce through their social channels. It also encourages customers to promote their support/purchase on their person profiles. Simply put, the brand is paying the customer for positive word-of-mouth marketing. Social Currency: Two different versions of social currency. First, where a user’s social updates act as currency. Second, is where the brand’s community social activity earns an actual currency. Social Transacting:
This is the ultimate goal of brands conducting social commerce.This where the communities directly interact with the brand in order to purchase their respective product.
