By Kat Matfield
Social commerce is one of the most effective ways of increasing customer loyalty - and efforts to increase customer loyalty have a far better ROI than attempts to win new customers. But not all social commerce tools are equally effective at this or equally suitable for all businesses and customer types.
We've seen lots of over-simplfications of the different values of Twitter followers or Facebook fans/friends. (We're all about cutting needless complexity out of social commerce, but over-simplification is worse than useless.) The latest infographic to tackle the topic gives a slightly more balanced and nuanced view.
Particularly interesting is the data on why people engage with brands on each social network and how likely that engagement is to lead to a purchase.
Why do consumers engage with brands?
1 in 3 Facebook users are happy to connect with a brand simply because they're already a customer. Twitter users are a little more likely to want something from the interaction, whether that's entertaining content (25% more popular on Twitter than Facebook) or discounts (18% more popular on Twitter).
I've simplified these two graphs to highlight only the most popular reasons to connect with brands.
Which network drives sales best?
Email used to be the effective but unexciting workhorse of driving sales, outperforming Facebook and Twitter while the social networks got all the attention.
This research indicates that's no longer true. Over a third of Twitter users say brand interactions are more likely to get them purchasing, compared to around a quarter of email recipients, and only 1 in 5 Facebook users.
But what's the real value of this loyalty?
Is it that Twitter drives more sales only at the expense of margin-eroding discounts and offers? Or is it the immediacy, or the user profile that makes a brand's Twitter followers more likely to buy with them?
It's impossible to tell from this data, which only makes it more important for businesses to carefully consider their strategy and measure the results of all their social media efforts.
Source: The images in this post come from BuySellAds' infographic comparing Twitter and Facebook users.