Media Notes Canonical Briefs

The biggest movement in retail is social commerce…the use of social networking sites as a vehicle to sell your product and/or services. Considering over half of all shoppers follow brands on social media to view new products, there is no denying the potential for social feeds to drive sales. It is critical for your business.

. Social referrals to retail eCommerce site have grown 110% in two (2) years.

. U.S. retailers adopting social commerce nearly doubled from 2017 to 2018.

. Fifty-eight (58%) percent of people say social media influences their purchasing decisions.

Because of this, great retailers and manufacturers who sell B2C use automated chatbots. They provide audience-focused information. Seven-two (72%) percent of shoppers are open to making a purchase through a chatbot. They offer product recommendations. Seventy-four (74%) percent of shoppers are open to making a purchase through a chatbot. And you sell directly through the bot. For instance, Marvel uses an automated chatbot checkout to sell tickets directly from social media posts. 

The key is to focus on mobile users. One needs to see a strong presence as forty-five (45%) percent of in-store consumers turn to mobile social platforms to influence their buying decisions. And, a great retailer/manufacturer needs to optimize for mobile devices. Abandonment rates are three times higher on mobile devices, likely due to lack of optimization.

In addition, as a keen focus on mobile users understand, one can offer deals exclusively to a […]

Research from Parse.ly, Facebook still remains the top social platform for referral traffic to media sites by a wide margin.

Parse.ly looked at referral data from its network during the first six months (January – July) of 2019. During that time, Facebook had an average of 924 million referrals per month. To put this into perspective, the social media platform with the next largest number of referrals per month was Twitter, which averaged 97 million per month during the period of analysis.

The other top social media platforms like Pinterest (25 million), Instagram (17 million), LinkedIn (16 million) and YouTube (1.5 million) referred far less traffic to the network of publishers using Parse.ly.

Of all of the platformed examined, Twitter has the fewest number of users, with recent Pew Institute figures showing that 24% of US adults use Twitter compared to the 69% who use Facebook and 37% who use Instagram.

With that in mind, it is interesting to see that Twitter has the highest average percentage of returning visitors, with 25% of referred visitors from Twitter having been to the same site in the same month. Facebook ranks second in this area with an average of 19% of referred visitors returning to the same site in one month.

While Instagram has made headway in becoming one of the top social media platforms for marketers, especially those who are targeting teens, it generates little return traffic with only an average of 5% of referred visitors returning to the same site in the same month. This is reportedly due to […]

Video accounts for a large portion of the advertising spend of major national advertisers, with marketers contending that video has high conversion rates than other content. When it comes to video, advertisers are still turning to social media platforms, with Pixability’s State of Digital Advertising Report revealing that the majority of agencies run campaigns on Facebook (90%), YouTube (88%) and Instagram (88%).

Pixability analyzed data from campaigns that ran on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Fire TV, and other connected television channels through their PixabilityONE platform. From this analysis, Pixability found that Facebook delivers the best click-through rates (CTR) at an average of 1.15%, followed by Instagram (0.47%) and YouTube (0.11%).

One notable finding from the report is that older consumers are more apt to click on video ads than younger consumers. Indeed, the average CTR for consumers 65 years and older on Facebook and Instagram is 3.42% and 1.8%, respectively. Meanwhile, those consumers between 55-64-years-old have an average CTR of 2.38% on Facebook and 1.73% on Instagram. This is far higher than the comparable CTR rates for the youngest group of adults (18-24-year-olds), which averaged 1.05% on Facebook and 0.46% on Instagram.

In contrast to Facebook and Instagram, YouTube videos appear to have low CTR across all age groups. The highest was an average of 0.13%, which was shared by those across the 25-54-year-old age brackets.

The good news for advertisers is that cost-per-view (CPV) has fallen for both Facebook and YouTube. YouTube’s CPV fell by one-third (32.5%) between 2018 and 2019, […]

In July, Instagram announced their test of hiding ‘Likes” on posts. Instagram says the reason for the new feature is to have users concentrate on their posts and interacting with the app, rather than likes.

However, as Emily and Sarah Hamilton wrote in The Drum (090219), ‘The big question is, how will this affect a business that is purely built on social media marketing and relies on social proof? This is a massive change for business.

‘Likes’ are one of the most recognizable elements of social proof, and a former core element to engagement metrics of a brands’ social platforms. If not engagement, what social metric will drive business results at top? A new era is here. It will be defined by personalized content. 

More than just a ‘Like’ 

In the beginning, social media was a new way people used to connect. Over time, people started to rely on social media platforms more and more. As a result, business owners started to take advantage of the data to understand a specific audience to create strategies to market their products on social media. Today, social media has become one of the most important aspects of digital marketing.

When you think about successful social media content, you are probably already thinking of the generic metrics like the number of ‘Likes’ you get. The number of ‘Likes’ a post receives helped brands to determine how engaged their followers were, what worked and what didn’t.

The number of double-taps can be considered as an acknowledgement. However, today’s social […]

Shep Hyken, writing in Forbes (090119) stated, ‘Malls are closing. Retail stores are fighting to stay afloat. Analysts expect that more than 6,000 stores will close in 2019. More than 40,000 employees are expected to be laid off. The blame is often cast on the new digital retail experience. Yes, the way a consumer shops is radically different than even just a few years ago, but consider the stats from ServiceChannel’s recent research outlined in The State of Brick and Mortar Retail Report.

The shopping experience is a buying experience, regardless of the industry.’

His first point was intriguing. ‘Eighty-six percent (86%) of consumers continue to make most of their purchases at brick and mortar locations. Yet many brick and mortar retailers fear how much business they are losing to online retailers. Yes, retailers must learn to compete with an online business, but that’s not the only reason a customer doesn’t return. Something as simple as a dirty restroom or a broken shelf could impact a return visit. Even something about the parking lot – too much traffic, having to walk too far, trash on the ground, etc. – could impact the experience enough to make a customer look for an alternative store.
In addition, 40% of customers surveyed said they are likely to spend less money in a store where there is a negative experience, while 43% said they are likely to jump to a competitor if they encounter any of these negative experiences. In other words, customers know what good service is. What’s more, they expect […]