4 Social Media Retail Mistakes
3. Waiting for a well-formulated social road map to start. While the potential revenue that on-site social applications can generate is huge, waiting to create the ideal social road map may actually reduce your chance of success. It’s hard to predict what will work best with your customers and your product categories. To make matters worse, while you're busy planning and building a consensus across the company your competitors may dive in and start getting real customer feedback to know what really works.
Recommendation: If you don’t already have Facebook-trained engineers and product managers on staff, you may need to partner with a social commerce vendor regardless of your plan. Picking the right partner can give you those necessary skills, plus allow you to easily test and improve upon different social experiences across your site. Because social commerce is still in its infancy, rapid experimentation and testing is key to generating the highest returns.
4. Looking for the social 'silver bullet.' Social technologies are evolving fast (as is consumer social behavior). Forrester’s recent SORO study shows there’s no proven solution in social marketing, though efforts to integrate social features on e-commerce sites have proven to work best for growing sales.
Recommendation: Look for a social solution that provides a wide range of on-site social experiences explicitly aimed at increasing the metrics that matter most, namely referral traffic and sitewide conversions. Customize these experiences to your specific products and users. Solutions with built-in A/B testing capabilities ensure the greatest opportunity to know what works for your business and what doesn’t, allowing you to optimize for the greatest user participation and overall lift in sales.
Darby Williams is vice president of marketing at Sociable Labs, an on-site social commerce company for online retailers and brands. Reach Darby on Twitter @DarbyWill.
