What is Social Commerce? Complete Guide with Examples & Use Cases

Source: Stephanie Chevalier

By 2025, it is estimated that social media channels can generate almost triple the current sales. Investing in these channels is becoming increasingly popular among e-commerce businesses.

In this article, we will explore the meaning of social commerce and discuss examples of how it can help your business expand.

What Is Social Commerce?

Social commerce is the process of using social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram to promote and sell products and services. These platforms use digital devices to serve customers and have e-commerce features in their applications, both sellers and buyers can rely on the platform to make transactions.

You can evaluate your campaign’s performance by measuring the degree to which consumers interact with the company's marketing through retweets, likes, and shares.

How Does Social Commerce Help Your Business?

Social commerce differs from a traditional social media marketing strategy. The old method is to create advertisements on social media platforms and draw potential customers to visit your website. With social commerce, visitors can interact with brands in a variety of ways:

• Inviting users to vote on product style or choices

• Offering personalized buyer options

• Encourage user-submitted photos, commentary, and feedback

• Offering promotions or giveaways to users who share the product on their feeds

All these actions enable potential customers to access your products conveniently without exiting the app and allow you to look for different ways to interact and build a relationship with customers.

Three examples of how social commerce can help your business :

Pinterest

Pinterest is a search engine combined with social media platform for images with over 400 million users. It allows users to create mood boards and discover new products. Around 97% of Pinterest searches are unbranded, which enables businesses like yours to reach potential customers which have no clue about your products yet.

Nordstrom, for example, uses Shoppable Pins to reach customers on the platform. They are optimized for key search words to maximize their chances of reaching their customers using the Shops tab on Pinterest. They even highlight items that were popular on Pinterest, with a “Popular on Pinterest” tag on the physical item in stores.

Facebook and Instagram

Without a doubt, Facebook and Instagram are the biggest social media platform owned by Meta. They have a combination of three hundred million users, crowning them the top of social media channels among businesses and selling products through them.

Both platforms allow businesses to upload their catalogs to a virtual storefront. It can all be managed in one account. Visitors can see the specifications of products — size and color, without leaving the platform.

In this example, the shop tagged items in shoppable posts, exposing itself to followers and attracting potential customers. This also gives them the ability to visit the product page from the post.

TikTok

With astonishing growth, Tiktok is a new star among social media channels. It is estimated to hit 48.8 million US users by 2025. 39% of users have discovered a product or brand on TikTok with around half of the users purchasing the newly discovered products. TikTok also partnered with Shopify to launch in-app shopping by allowing businesses to add shopping tabs to their brand’s profile and showcase a virtual storefront for users.

There you have it! We believe social commerce is an investment worth making. As social media users continue to rise, it is becoming an increasingly lucrative channel for businesses to build relationships with customers. Be sure to use attractive media to captivate potential customers!