Till recently, a marketer’s social media marketing efforts were limited to creating Twitter profiles, Facebook pages and similar activities. But social shopping is the latest phenomenon, which is rapidly gaining popularity on the social scene.
The latest trend in social media marketing is implementation of social sign-on. With sign-on, people can just login to their Facebook account instead of having to register on the ecommerce sites. The retailers also benefit as they get access to the information available on their customers’ Facebook profiles, allowing them to make targeted purchase suggestions. The information available is extensive; the Facebook profile contains information like email, name, snaps, gender, birthdays, website, social graph, location, and a lot of other general information. Apart from this, the marketers can also get additional information like the articles, products and content their customers ‘liked’ earlier. Having access to all this information is a huge advantage for the retailers, especially for targeted advertising and personalized recommendations.
In a survey by social sign-on applications provider Gigya, 50% of online retailers in the survey were either planning to implement the feature soon or had already implemented it. The top benefits of implementing this feature were increased engagement, information for targeted marketing, personalized recommendations, and extended reach for offering coupons and promotions.
While social shopping has many possibilities, marketers need to be cautious while giving personalized suggestions and doing targeted advertising. Although there is a high possibility that these may result in high conversion rates and cost effective advertising; there is also a chance that some customers may consider such personalized recommendations an invasion of their privacy leading to a negative impact