Social commerce strategy: Grab a slice of the $1 trillion pie
Social commerce is anticipated to surpass $1 trillion. A winning social commerce strategy positions your brand for growth.
In today’s social world, Twitter has, without question, emerged as one of the most influential social channels available for business use, and the ability to tap it for communication and lead generation purposes is a huge advantage for businesses. But, not every company has a marketing department that can manage social media alongside all of their other day-to-day activities – especially channel partners that rely on brands for marketing support.
So, how can these brands with channel communities ensure that their message resonates across Twitter without spending an exorbitant amount of time manually asking their partners to publish them? Social media syndication solutions have emerged as one key way to address this issue.
These solutions allow channel marketers to automatically publish content through their partners’ Twitter handles. URLs connected to these social updates are automatically connected back to the partner website.
Social media syndication is relatively new to the market, but it holds huge potential for companies looking to better utilize the channel.
Automating social media engagement lets marketers spend their time wisely
Currently, there are not many options out there to help vendors contribute content to their partners’ Twitter channel. The main method of getting content out there is simply sending out suggested tweets or other social updates and asking partners to proactively publish them. However, even if your tweets are eloquently written, whenever you inject a manual process into your marketing efforts, the success rate drops dramatically.
Social syndication removes this manual step and automatically publishes the content through the partner’s Twitter identity. From the outsider’s perspective, it appears the partners are publishing the update themselves.
This allows the vendor to publish across the entire community with a consistent message.
Get greater reach with social syndication
Enrolling the channel community with social syndication can give brands access to a wider audience. Moreover, because the process is automated, the success rate of publishing across the channel socially is 100 percent consistent.
This means that not only will all of your enrolled partners post the message, but all of their followers will see it as well. The message will be spread exponentially and you’ll be able to more easily ensure that a hashtag or a tweet is trending on Twitter. Access to a tool that allows you to directly affect social trends, can be a game changer.
Partners want to cultivate their social presence and stay current
Generally speaking, your partners are not marketing experts, and marketing is not their focus.
While they may occasionally tweet a news story or promote their products, they do not have an entire team of professionals dedicated to managing their social channels. This isn’t the case with many of the larger vendors, which often have a social media team or even a whole communications firm dedicated to these efforts. Social syndication gives these smaller partners access to the experts that are behind the wheel of their brand. They no longer have to worry about keeping up-to-date with the latest vendor initiatives and trends because their social media presence maintenance is handled for them.
Connecting social content to a partner’s website strengthens user experience
Many of the social syndication platforms on the market today only syndicate tweets across partner communities, but then don’t actually link back to the partner site. Instead, the posts link to the vendor site. This often causes confusion and actually creates channel conflict.
When shopping for a social syndication solution, confirm that every link points to vendor content on the partner site. This closes the loop and drives important metrics that influence the sales and marketing side of the business.
Brands need visibility into their social channels
Asking users to manually push data to their followers doesn’t offer much in terms of understanding the reach of your message. You can manually search for the hashtag, but there’s no definite way to get an understanding of what’s happening. With analytics from social syndication solutions you will have access to social analytics allowing your team to constantly position the partner community for success.
