I spend a lot of time talking about how social media has already disrupted the traditional buying process in B2B, with over 68% of potential prospects carrying out their own due diligence on a company, it's employees and leadership teams via social media before any direct contact is made with a potential vendor its solid evidence that the entire buying funnel and related inertia has shifted forever in favour of the buyer.
I've also been tracking the rise of 'social commerce' and its impact or otherwise on the B2C sector, and from what I can see there are many similarities happening with what we saw in B2B land, only I think the pace of change will be even faster and far more widespread.
I found this interesting article (link below) that provides some interesting stats on how 'social commerce' is already front and centre of all social media platforms.
The growing popularity of social shopping likely is a result of the efforts by companies like Facebook, Pinterest and Snap to boost direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales on their platforms with digital transactions. Facebook-owned Instagram, which is estimated to have about 110 million users in the U.S., in the past year expanded its shopping features. The image-sharing app in May created a special account called @shop that brings together posts from online merchants that sell products, among other social-shopping efforts.
Most of this innovation didn't happen in the west, we have seen China taking the lead on social commerce for sometime, and whilst we all used to think that what happens in the US will happen here, maybe its time to re-think that as well.
The modern consumer is extremely demanding and also very impatient with a brand, the 'I want it now' generation' is what is driving these changes via the global adoption and take up of social media platforms, which at July 2019 stood at circa 3.5 billion people.
People today don't have to go to your website, they don't have to be interrupted with your intrusive adverts, inertia is with them, not you.
So when you have realised that the 'advertise and promote' thinking that's draining your budget and resource no longer work what are you going to do when your nearest, or as yet unknown competitor has nibbled a sizable chunk of you business across numerous social media platforms?
Social networks have given marketers more software tools to set up their social-media storefronts, helping to minimize their investment. Social media companies also are delivering results by providing "contextual relevance to shopping,"
unknownx500
