I recently wrote about creating “Hey You!” “Customer Experience Moments” using social media logins (the OAuth Protocol) to better understand your customers. A few days ago, Monetate came up with a very interesting infographic called “Social Login & Sharing – Affect Commerce?” This is turn is based on research from Forrester, ExactTarget, Gigya, Hubspot, etc. This extremely insightful infographic talks about the need to move beyond the ‘Like’s and ‘Followers’ of Social media to actually using social media logins and sharing to increase conversions, engagements and other success metrics in the world of eCommerce. I would quickly summarise the benefits before adding my viewpoints
1. Shopping Cart Disruption – An integrated social media login ensures that people do not have to register again and can toggle between their shopping experience and social networks seamlessly
2. Increased social sharing – With the seamless integration across social media and an eCommerce store, products are likely to be shared more frequently and regularly. Hence relevance to prospective buyers is created.
3. Increase key metrics – Metrics like Average Time on Site And Average number of Page Views are likely to see major improvements
This is a validation of my thought process where I strongly recommend businesses (eCommerce or otherwise) to drop the need for separate authentications and profile creation on their transactional sites. We should leverage social media logins as much as possible in order to better understand customer preferences. This then leads into the “Four steps for monetizing Social Media’s Big Data” where businesses can use the customer’s social profile data to understand their preferences, in turn increasing their participation in the social community around the product (what Monetate refers to as Social Sharing), creating abilities for personalisation and finally resulting in predictive analytics of the consumer demands of any given product.
The space of Social Media is quickly evolving from Facebook to InstaGram to Vine to WhatsApp to WeChat. And the reason why all these networks are hugely successful is obviously the “
So instead of focussing on which channel to use and how to use it, businesses should latch on to underlying value propositions like sharing of texts, pictures, videos and memories across channels, build a middle layer between enterprise IT ecosystem and the public networks for authentication and data capture around preferences. This eventually would serve as the most important input into the CRM systems for enterprises to manage relationships and experiences with customers aimed towards personalisation and proactive predictions and selling.
Social Media holds tremendous potential of increasing profitability as it gives access to a person’s innermost ‘circle of trust’. How businesses can leverage it is a strategy that one has to carefully craft out for itself.
Social Integration with Enterprise IT Ecosystem
