Social eCommerce: from billboards to Artificial Intelligence

The question is very simple: if you have a local business and you are in the 90s, your options to advertise your business are limited to signage, radio and TV broadcasters, word of mouth and little else .

If, on the other hand, you are in the years '20 of the new millennium, the situation is radically different: the advertising options are very numerous, as numerous is now the number of your competitors who can enjoy the network to sell products at reduced costs on the other side of the world.

Businesses go where customers go

This is a golden rule that takes on even more value in the new digital era. With the advent of e-commerce, from the smallest to the giants like Amazon, the reality of most businesses can no longer be limited to the community around them .

Today it is more necessary than ever to go where the customers are.

Customers are online

We all or almost all know and use the ubiquitous social platforms. For entertainment, information, dialogue, work or shopping.

An average user spends over an hour a day on the various social platforms and the average users are many:

• more than 2 billion of users active monthly on Facebook.
• 895 million monthly active users on Instagram.
• 604 million members on LinkedIn.
• 313 million users active monthly on Twitter.
• 100 million monthly active users on Pinterest.
• 307 million of users active daily on Snapchat.

And they talk about you

Even if you don't have social pages dedicated to your company or your brand, there is a good chance that the name of your company is already online and that your customers have had the opportunity to comment.

One example above all: TripAdvisor. If you own a business in the tourism / restaurant sector, your business will be present on the platform together with the first review sent by a customer, regardless of your desire to be present online or not.

You may like it, you may not like it, but the web is nothing more than a digital transposition of the interactions that take place in the real world. The same happens for example if you perform a check-in on Facebook or Google at a place or business.

Your customers are already online and reviewing your business; hence the need for a social strategy that leads them to talk about you, but also with you.

But they also want to talk to you

The social presence of commercial brands, from small local realities to large multinationals, is now a fact that must be taken into account.

Customers or potential customers expect to have a direct contact channel with the company available and very often they can, for example, turn to the Facebook page of an activity even before the official website.

Why? For two simple reasons: reviews and interaction

Reviews and Followers: The Heart of Your E-Commerce

A website is a digital showcase that aims to communicate and offer products or services. Even the most interactive and accessible site that can be built will still communicate vertically, from the company to the customer .

The integration between social e-commerce is instead the ideal solution that allows the customer to interact with the business through a network that puts everyone at the same level, through which it is possible to interact simultaneously with the producer and with their personal community of relatives and friends.

The reviews, the likes or the comments of the people on our list of friends are a very powerful tool, quite comparable to the word of mouth that can take place in a local community.

Today this community exists and is given by the social network that we use continuously. E-commerce are the showcases of the shops in this community, and there is no business that can flourish without an excellent relationship with its community.

Interaction: Humans or Robots?

The methods of interaction that an e-commerce can implement to strengthen its brand on social networks are numerous and depend largely on the nature of the business itself.

A rule which is however always good to respect is that according to which one should not try only and exclusively to sell; it's also important to generate content and really useful and interesting interactions for the target you are targeting.

A well-planned social strategy will see e-commerce flourishing and contact requests multiplying.

In most cases, users who refer to social networks for their purchases prefer interactions via chat rather than by phone.

The bif digital realities are evolving more and more to meet this need, developing specific solutions for companies (like WhatsApp Business) or through the use of ChatBot: real virtual assistants who interact with the customer simulating a human interaction and becoming increasingly sophisticated as they receive new information, learning what customers require, such as they express themselves and what they need.

In other words, an Artificial Intelligence that acts as a link between your e-commerce and the social network, collecting information, learning and automatically managing the most frequent requests.

Faced with such a rapid, radical and unstoppable evolution, it may be natural to develop a nostalgic sense of detachment that leads to prefer the shop under the house rather than a robot in a Russian server farm, while considering the difference of price. By appreciating the technological value of innovation and applying it to the digital opportunities we have today, however, it is possible to develop unprecedented innovative solutions, reaching previously unthinkable customers and volumes.

Who knows that in twenty years there will be no nostalgia for these specific opportunities .

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