ROI social commerce Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

ROI social commerce - Essay Example In the modern business environment, social media provides a great opportunity for commerce because of the large audiences that this media draws. But business organizations grapple with how to determine the returns from investing in social media given that it does not give direct returns like the other known forms of investment. Indeed, the benefits accrued from investing in social media could be determined and this paper seeks to elaborate on how to make this achievement. The Big Five – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest - as referred to as by Marsden and Chaney (2012) provide sales opportunities in the emerging social economy. Social commerce has increasingly been adopted by organizations to reach out to wider market coverage more effectively. Griffin (2009) refers to such a strategy as social commerce which the scholar defines as harnessing the wisdom of many from the Internet to assist shoppers in finding and buying products and services. The driving force b ehind this is the social media, which can no longer be considered as a fad but a part of today’s consumers’ daily lives. ... The commerce aspect appreciates the need for human intervention for a sale to take place (Clapperton, 2012). Increasingly adopted by organizations’ sales arms, social commerce provides a critical online sales strategy for firms as customers seek for fast product search tools. How to Use Social Media in Social Commerce Having the social media as the business tool and the great audience that comes with it would not be adequate in entirety. There has to be effective strategies in which organizations engage this audience through social media so as to convert the normal activities on the media into opportunities for sale. This is an aspect that organizations need to be well versed in as in the near future, social media would be so enshrined in regular business communication and would only be beneficial to those with effective conversion strategies. The first way in which social media would be used in social commerce involves sharing. According to Marsden and Chaney (2012), organiza tions now create sharable content allowing customers to easily share links on their products or important website pages by placing buttons that would enable the ‘like’ function for Facebook, ‘share by email’ or ‘Tweet’. Social sharing gives the ability for users to share content posted on the organization’s website to their social profiles. Additionally, it allows for inclusion of comments on the item that has been shared. Therefore, social sharing provides an effective way of driving traffic back to the organization’s site. Secondly, social media could be used as an effective tool to collect feedback through the ratings and reviews on products. While social sharing by word of mouth