Fcommerce: lessons and basic concepts – Facebook Marketing 2012
July 18th, 2012 by Adam Tinworth
Paul Marsden, Social Commerce Today
Fcommerce is just selling with Facebook.
There’s ecommerce on Facebook – buying things on Facebook, selling fans things via Facebook
Facebook on ecommerce – Facebook Open Graph buttons on your commerce site. Want, Puchase and Donate buttons are all coming. And then you can combine the two, by embedding a shop into Facebook – but with a twist. You buy with a Like or a share…
Facebook in-store – fitting rooms with Facebook terminals, so you can get shopping advice from your friends. We’ll see that flipped, with in-store events shared into Facebook.
Brands think deals are low on the list of what people want – but actually they’re right at the top. What people don’t want is “engagement”. Â ROI is just the revenue from Facebook, divided by the amount spent. The simplest way to prove it is to shift stock. But to do it, you have to be remarkable – something that’s a first, unique, that creates word of mouth.
As you dig deeper, three things drive success in selling on Facebook:
The brands that succeed are offering a social value proposition: social utility – helping people solve problems together.
It helps you solve the “does my butt look big in this” problem – it harnesses social intelligence. A wise man learns from the experience of others. Collaborative group buying hasn’t really happened on Facebook yet.
Burberry helps its fans stand out with pop-up stores, giving them early access to new products – that’s social status. Fitting in? Heinz’s get well soup gift store helps people bond socially via gift-giving.
So, the social utility emerges when you help people solve these problems:
- social intelligence
- social status
- social bonding
Thomas Messett, Nokia
That graphic of what people want on Facebook? Rubbish. Think of that Henry Ford quote about asking customer what they want, and getting the answer “a faster horse”. Yes, you can do social commerce. Yes, you can use Facebook as a tool to drive valuable sales – but you don’t have to give things away cheaply.
Blindly driving up engagement is pointless – we need a bottom line. How can we find a middle line? Most people will never visit your page after they Like it. The interaction happens on the news feed. People share stuff – all the time. Everywhere.
This is about social proof and sharing.
We don’t sell product to consumers. We sell via partners. What we need to do is drive consumers to our partners. We can’t drop a pop-up shop into our Facebook page. The time people are most excited about our products is when they’ve just bought it. How can we make it easier for them to share that excitement? And if they do share it, and a friend clicks on that link and buys a phone, shouldn’t the original sharer be rewarded?
Social has always been social. Spotify have ruined Facebook for frictionless sharing. He’s scared of the app because it will ruin his Facebook feed. How do you encourage people to share without being pushy? You have to be really, really clear in allowing people to opt out. Yes, there are ways to incentivise people. Can you digitise the refer a friend mechanic? They’re trailing that in a couple of markets.
Remember: it’s platforms + apps, not stores and pages.
Tags: #fbkm12, ecommerce, F-commerce, facebook, Nokia, platforms, retail, social utility