In today's crowded online market place, it can be difficult to ensure your brand, products and services are exposed to your core target audience.

Whether you're a small to medium sized business or a large corporation, social media has become a critical part of the marketing mix, but how can you drive revenue from your social activity?

Generating profit from social media - also known as Social Commerce - involves using social media, user contributions and online social interactions to assist in the buying and selling of products and services.

Our Social Commerce Applications described below can help ensure your social media activity is driving real business benefit and they are surprisingly affordable.

If you would like to find out more, call or email us now.

Improve SEO

Social media now plays a big part in helping search engines to determine what is actually valuable, useful content, and imagery (particularly user generated photos and videos), is one of the most engaging forms of marketing. Therefore, if you have content on your website that gets shared, tweeted, liked etc, this proves to search engines that this is something important, and enhances your SEO.

One of the very best ways to encourage interaction and engagement on your website is to enable review functionality. Our social media partner, Digital Visitor, has developed a website application which enables visitors to your website to quickly and easily upload reviews, ratings, photos, and videos. Another key feature of the solution is that this content can then be shared to the user's individual social channels, putting your brand and products in front of other like minded people - people who are more likely to buy from people they know and trust.

Quite simply; great, unique content = greater awareness of your site = more people will share your content and link to your site. This greater traffic leads to greater search results and better rankings, a perfect virtuous circle.

Influence purchasing behaviour

There have been many reports highlighting the significant influence that reviews and user generated content have on consumers when making a purchase decision. In the travel industry specifically, research has found that 88% of travellers consult reviews before making a booking and half say that reviews are the greatest influence on their booking choices.

Like it or not, today's savvy internet users require user generated content such as reviews, ratings, photos and videos to help them make their decision to buy. Why? Because people trust other consumers for advice and guidance. According to research conducted by emarketer, consumer reviews are trusted 12 times more than product descriptions by the company.

Social Commerce Applications

We have teamed up with Digital Visitor to offer you Social Commerce Applications that can enhance each stage of the customer buying cycle on your website. They are simple to integrate into your website and very affordable.

1. Visitor Discuss

Help your visitor's research and dream about the experiences you offer when they first get to your website with genuine, authentic customer photos, videos and comments. By enabling discussion functionality on your website, your visitors can ask previous customers questions to gain an authentic representation of your offerings. Our Visitor Discuss solution allows you to do this.

2. Visitor Attract

If your online visitor has still not made a purchase decision, our Visitor Attract solution enables them to subscribe to receive new discussions, reviews, photos and videos about the experiences or destinations they are interested in. This goes beyond RSS feeds and company newsletters as they are receiving engaging content from your existing customers.

3 Visitor Review

So let's say your visitor has decided where they want to go e.g. Greece, but they still need to decide on the best package. This is where reviews and ratings shown directly on your product pages have been proven to increase the online conversions and transactions of your website. Show your visitors they don't need to visit anywhere else for confidence in their purchasing decision. Visitor Review allows your customers to upload photos and videos for a more engaging review of your products and experiences.

After your customers have travelled, simply waiting for them to contribute reviews can be a long, slow process. In fact, some research found that as low as 0.01% of website visitors will submit reviews voluntarily. On the other hand, proactive gathering of content can deliver many more reviews - in some cases up to 15% of all buyers - and generally it's more inspiring and positive. Visitor Review will encourage your customers to submit valuable reviews. Astudy by eConsultancy in 2010 found that high product ratings increases the likelihood of purchase for 55% of consumers.

What next?

Our Social Commerce Applications are affordable and are very easily integrated into your website. Interested? Call or email us now.