Of all the social media marketing buzzwords you hear on a daily basis, there’s one that stands out as perhaps the most crucial.
Everywhere you look, the push in digital, social and mobile media marketing is driven toward creating relevance for potential customers. Relevant content. Relevant information. And of course, relevant advertising.
This push toward relevance is highly evident through trends in online retailing that are collectively named, “social commerce.” Simply put, social commerce refers to the business practice of using social media profile data, most notably via Facebook, to craft highly personalized shopping experiences.
Read: relevant shopping experiences.
Mining the profiles of Facebook users to uncover personal preferences is a virtual goldmine for digital media advertisers. And despite the privacy reservations of most social media users, social commerce works well for retailers because access to profile information is granted by the users themselves: through Facebook’s “social sign-on” feature.
Social sign-on provides an attractive alternative to registering at each individual ecommerce retailer. Instead, shoppers can simply sign into their Facebook account, and when they do so, the retailer gains admission to the data stored in the user’s profile.
Taking social sign-on a step further, many retailers are offering cooperative shopping experiences, which allow users to sync up for real-time, virtual shopping encounters with friends online. It’s called “Buy With Friends,” and it’s the digital version of taking a trip to the mall – sans the search for a parking space close to the entrance.
Buy With Friends was largely conceived with idea of driving virtual goods sales for Facebook games, but it’s already morphing into a sophisticated way for businesses to create revenue. It does so by offering users fresh information about what their friends are buying, riding the tide of past brick and mortar retailing success for everything from Crocks to iPods.
These latest digital marketing tools offer more clear evidence that social media is becoming a real force in the way we communicate, shop, and live in the information age. And not only that, but social media is also becoming more and more. . . .Relevant.
