1. Who is Standing in-front of you?

Social Commerce requires you to clearly define your customers' profile. Thus define who your target audience is. This is one of the most vital steps in starting to understand and use Social Commerce as part of your Marketing and Sales strategy.

Ask:

• Who are they?
• How old are they?
• Where do the "hang out"?
• What toothpaste do they use?
• (you get the picture)

2. Your Website

To make the most of Social Commerce your need to define a clear customer journey for first time visitors on your website, guiding them to take action. This is crucial in the process of a new customer purchasing, using your ecommerce facility. Make sure you use read your statistics every week, if not daily to help with this process. Ask yourself whether your home page has all the benefits about your offering and a call to action through a video or free audio download? If not, why not?

3. Six Dimensions

Look at the following six dimensions and consider which one your business and consumer benefit from?

• Social Shopping: allowing you to share the act of shopping together.
• Ratings & Reviews: provide independent third party evaluation and allows viewers to contribute and discuss
• Recommendations & Referrals: promotes personal recommendations and referrals within social circles.
• Forums & Communities: Connect people with each other and allows a business to moderate and curate an environment.
• Social Media Optimisation: Adding Twitter, Facebook, Blogs etc to your website
• Social Apps: Create branded online applications that support social interaction.

4. Your Vision

Social Commerce requires you to be clear about who you are and what differentiates you offering. Ask yourself: What are my customers buying from me? This is the "Value Add" and can help you understand that customers buy "Benefits" and not "Features".

Also ask yourself what your "Value Proposition" is. This is a short sharp statement of "why people will buy my service". Clear bulletted points can be useful here.

Once you have this, it’s essential to have continuity from the first point of contact, all the way through to the sales process and followed by, your after sales customer service.

5. Social Networking

Social Networking has a big role to play in Social Commerce and can transform your business from a B2B or B2C to a DTC - Direct To Consumer, by connecting how people buy and how they connect with you. There are specific tools that help buyers track keyword usage and conversations.

Outline a general roadmap for starting out with social commerce and adapt a strategy for social media by connecting with the influencers. Use the right software to engage, share, and collaborate.

6. Listen

Effective Social Commerce begins by monitoring the social media activity in your market and parallel sectors. What are competitors seeking to achieve and with which tools? Include this monitoring in your broader social media monitoring solution that tracks the reputation and reach of your brand or business in social media. Learn about what’s available by signing up to social shopping portals.

7. Experiment

Decide what you want to achieve (monetising social media marketing, optimising ecommerce, business model innovation) and based on your findings, start a number of small-scale trials designed to deliver against this objective. Start simple and learn to adjust. If you have social features already on your website, extend these into social network platforms. More generally, take advantage of proven solutions that allow you to experiment easily with little time or investment such as customer testimonials, ratings and reviews, user forums, social media optimisation and referral programs. Make measurement a priority.

8. Apply

The application of Social Commerce requires you to take results from small-scale experiments, and build on what works applying what you have learned by integrating social commerce into your broader business, ecommerce or social media marketing strategy. Remember that social commerce tools deliver business value when they deliver real value to the people using them, so it’s critical to give users a compelling reason to engage with social media. Choose toolsets appropriately based on whether you are seeking to enhance product discovery, product selection or product referral and continually capture feedback on how well you are doing.

9. Develop

The use of social media and ecommerce are constantly expanding, so make the on-going development of your social commerce strategy an on-going priority – integrating new insights, tools and technologies as they become available. Remember that social media is a conversational medium, so listen closely and respond quickly to user feedback on your social commerce solution. Explore how you might apply newer, more innovative social commerce solutions such as portable social graphs, social media stores or offering new social media services.

10. Finding your Formula

Before you do anything you must have a plan and a process for Social Commerce. Having a clear strategy around communicating on different social networking platforms is a priority and once you have this and have found your target audience, use a CRM like to automate the process. Don't spend your valuable time by sending every email with a personal message, do what you're best at and get software and/or a virtual assistant to do the rest.

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