If a friend rang you up right now on your mobile and tried to sell you a bouncy castle, a) you’d be puzzled and b) a bit annoyed that your friend was leveraging your relationship and using a mainly private channel – your mobile to try and sell you something you don’t want.
By Ross Furlong, founder of BlogStar.co.uk
Chances are, you might start avoiding their calls for a while.
It’s the same with Facebook – you can’t be seen to be directly selling something to your friends – they won’t like it. You can enthuse and be an advocate for certain products sure, but a sales person, no, it’s just not on.
For etailers, this means that social media is not really a direct sales channel. Some retailers have reported success with Facebook commerce, while others like Gap have beaten a quiet retreat.
Having a Fcommerce operation is OK, but for me, I’ll never understand why you would buy from Facebook rather than the more media rich environment of the online store. Plus I don’t really want my friends to know where I shop to be honest.
What social media is much better at is creating a huge audience of enthusiasts for a brand. A few years ago brands had to pay for that audience via third party media, but now they can successfully grow their own.
The real value of social media to ecommerce is not then how many socks you can sell off a Facebook page, but how much your new social media audience is worth to you in terms of lifetime value and advertising costs saved.
Social media is more akin to email marketing in that sense, whereby you build an audience and nurture it rather than sell it into alienation.
As most Facebook users visit every day, there’s plenty more opportunities to engage with them than there are by email of course, which is an opportunity to build a strong bond, rather than a chance to sell everyday.
This is the thing e-commerce operators need to get right first of all – how to engage and build their social media communities over the long term.
You need a design and content plan, an engagement strategy and someone well trained to interact with online customers as they would in store.
For bigger operations, this will mean the help of a call centre, whose operators are trained to moderate Facebook pages and Twitter streams.
This will be the price of success in social media for many, when you don’t have time to handle the weekend Facebook wall posts, you’re doing something right!
