Monetising social media – what’s here and what’s coming

If there’s one thing that every single brand asks when they run a social media campaign, it’s ‘how can I generate ROI?’  While in the earlier days of social media, users were very closed off to the idea of being sold to, this is beginning to change. At the start we were busy getting our own heads around how social networks could benefit us, without brands interfering and trying to sell to us. Now however, the brands have grown up and know how to use social media to entertain their customers, and users are becoming accustomed to the fact that there are advantages to following brands online, directly linked to commerce. With this shift in behaviour from both parties, there are some huge opportunities for brands to monetize their social media efforts, beyond simply adding a shopping cart to their Facebook Page.

Referral-Based Social Commerce

While Groupon has successfully introduced the idea of group buying, the referral system currently only works for promotions and discounts, which remain ‘locked’ until enough people have registered. But the next stage for this is in referral-based commerce, where the user is directly rewarded for referring people through to the purchase points. BE Broadband In the UK experimented with this earlier in the year with their ‘spread the Love campaign’. Here they introduced a one-off Twitter promotion that allowed people to get discounts off their broadband based on how many people they referred to the site through Twitter :

This isn’t really something that brands are introducing on a wider scale yet, but it’s an exciting opportunity that will begin to be utilized, that more importantly can be integrated into your website or Facebook Page. At either of these points, the user is just one click away from accessing their entire online community that could be important potential customers that are even more valuable as they can be driven by trusted user recommendations.  Brands can capitalize on this by integrating the option to refer products to friends, building up a social currency on the site that can be redeemed against offers.

Just as social media has lead to everyone becoming mini-publishers in their own right, constantly creating and sharing content, the same can apply for commerce with the idea of everyone becoming ‘social sellers’. The difficulty comes of course in how this impacts on the social experience for users, and this is where I believe the brand has a level of responsibility in how the social referral system can be run. For example this could only allow the user to share the product with friends that have certain interests, so they know the content will be relevant, or it can be limited to a certain number of friends per product, to reduce spamming.

Mobile Apps

Now while mobile apps may not sound that revolutionary when it comes to monetizing social media activity, this is an area that many brands continue to ignore, in spite of the significant user demand. Smartphone usage is on the up, and this means more people spending time on their phones while in queues, on the train, and passing the time when you would have had nothing to do otherwise. Essentially this means that brands have a chance to use what would previously have been ‘dead’ time – a point at which you had no contact with your consumers and the only chance you had to sell to them may have been through one of a hundred generic posters.

But now people want to use this time on their mobiles, and more importantly, they want to use it to buy things. A recent report from Demandware shows that while 23% of consumers have downloaded a shopping app, with 50% planning on downloading one, only 12% of retailers are actually offering this. This is a huge gap in the supply and demand of mobile-based commerce that brands should be taking advantage of. But as well as simply offering a mobile app in the same vein as the experience of buying on your site, there are ways that brands can begin to change the mobile shopping experience overall, in reflection of the fact that while a transaction may be completed within a mobile app, that might not necessarily be the place that the user journey started. Often you will find that the user first saw the product in store, but might complete the purchase within an app.

Brands can start to make this really clever, by introducing scanning of products in store that can make up your mobile shopping cart in a new way. Imagine if you could go around scanning everything you saw in a store that you liked, and then access this information retrospectively to see the latest prices and availability, and also products that are similar to this. Here brands can extend the store experience even after you’ve left the store itself and use this as a continual point of engagement with the consumer, to encourage them back or to complete the purchase through the app. When looking at how to maximise mobile, or app-based commerce, brands should look at ways to utilise the actual device itself to make the experience more social and use new functionality within the device to transform the consumer experience.

If you’re looking for inspiration in this are, Best Buy is a great example of a company utisiling mobile commerce apps, beyond simple catalogue models. The recent rollout of the shopkick app , which includes Best Buy as a retailer, integrates location features including rewards for consumers for entering into stores. Best Buy are getting in on this earlier, but it represents a much wider opportunity for businesses, as Shopkick are currently looking for 1,000 business across 10 cities to take part in the initiative :

The Gamification of Commerce

Gamification is one of the next big things in social media, as brands find ways to introduce points, levels, badges and more to entertain their followers and create more time spent with the brand itself. But at the moment, this concept is being misunderstood by many brands, who introduce gamification into their site or social profiles, with no real consideration as to what motivates the user to play in the first place. To really engage with gaming concepts, the user has to have something to strive for, there has to be a reason for playing, beyond just putting a badge there for the sake of it. And this is where commerce can come in. I’d like to see brands start using gaming concepts, where relevant, to unlock certain products on the site that can’t be attained anywhere else.

This has to be carried out carefully of course. Bring people to a site where they have to play a game or complete a challenge to buy any of your products and you’ll probably find they’ll leave pretty quickly. But this can be made part of the wider social experience. Say for example you’re announcing a new t-shirt design to the fans on your Facebook Page. Instead of making this available to all, this can be made into a limited edition that can only be accessed by completing a task that actually relates to the product itself. For example you can add a treasure hunt element. Suddenly the user has something to obtain and strive for. You’re engaging your existing fans so you know you’re talking to the right audience and not putting off first-time visitors to your site and you’re also creating an additional level of engagement with your brand, all within the context of playing a game and a positive user experience.

And the good news for brands is that the demand for gamification is there. A recent study has just been released  that shows half of the online population in the U.S. are already playing social games during the working day, with discounts being cited as the most compelling reason for completing a social challenge. This shows gamification moving in the same direction as social media overall. While it initially may not have been a space for brands, people are opening up to corporate presence in social gaming and social challenges, provided there is a very real reason for doing this. This is exciting news for those interested in monetising their activity in social media and using new social technologies to turn a fan into a customer.

Of course one of the biggest barriers to gamification for brands, is the technology needed to implement it on your site. This is where services such as Badgeville come in handy. They offer a gamification service for sites, and an endorsement of the future of gamification comes perhaps in the form of a recent round of funding Badgeville completed, to the tune of $2.5 million

Socialise the Customer Experience

It won’t be long until the idea of the same homepage being displayed for everyone seems completely archaic. While brands can certainly choose to show the same products to all of their users, they risk ignoring the huge amount of information and data available on their customers that will enable them to personalise the experience and increase the likelihood of a site visit turning into a sale. It’s all about socializing the experience someone has with your brand, whether this is on your site or your social profile.

 

 

At the moment the biggest opportunity here is Facebook Connect, which many brands are already using on their site to change the information that’s shown, for example showing you products that friends have Liked, or those that are relevant to you based on the information within your profile. The most impressive use of Facebook Connect within a retail site surely comes from Levis, who have developed a sophisticated shopping experience that allows you to bring friends into the purchasing journey in an impressive way, for example showing products that they also Like :

But there is a huge opportunity for brands to take this to another level.  Our entire social activity isn’t contained within a Facebook profile alone, and there’s an entire social make-up of consumers that can be used to change the way you do business. In any given day I will check out my Facebook profile, tweet, blog, share photos on Instagram and probably check in on Facebook. All of this information is invaluable to brands and can be used to tell me about products I didn’t even know I wanted. Imagine if I can land on a site and see a suggestion of tickets I should buy to a concert near me because I checked into a certain location and shared a link to a similar song on Twitter. This completely personalises the experience in a whole new way.

The opportunity for brands here is to take the information I’m sharing it and present it back to me in a way that actually saves me a job. I obviously don’t want to hear about a concert before it’s too late, or spend time endlessly searching for the exact thing I want or need. So if a brand can tell me what I want before I know it myself, I’m more likely to convert and become a loyal follower of them online. Now of course this may be a long way off because it relies on users giving access to that information, but the technology can begin to be introduced by brands on an opt-in basis. ‘Do you want to shop with us the normal way, or the really, really cool way?’