The social media phenomenon began with the purpose of simple connection and communication between people, but as it is now a daily ritual in people lives around the world, its power to become a natural connection for buyers and sellers has become obvious, too.
Buying and selling online is only going to increase. The web hosting and statistics website, hostingfacts.com, predicts that 1.79 billion people are expected to purchase something online by the end of 2018.
And Statista.com predicts that by 2021, over 2.14 billion people worldwide will buy goods and services online, up from 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016.
Social media platforms will have a growing piece of that pie, since they offer a connection point to hosted or self-hosted ecommerce sites like Shopify or Big Commerce, and the online marketplaces like EBay and Etsy. The beauty of using social media to sell products is that if a business owner is struggling to bring fans or followers to a sales site, social media sites can help bring the site to them.
Facebook unveiled Marketplace in 2017, for example, behaving much like a free-to-list classified ad site, while Instagram added its Shop Now button, and Pinterest introduced its Buyable Pins. It’s time to sit up and take notice of social commerce, especially since hostingfacts.com reports that 30 percent of online shoppers are willing to purchase a product on social media sites and that social media influences the shopping activities of 23 percent of online shoppers.
This is not a surprise to tech entrepreneurs like Patrick Mackaronis, who along with a team of entrepreneurs created a social media platform called Brabble, which allows users to combine audio, video, photo and text in one post. But the app’s newest development is the ability to buy and sell products to others directly through Brabble’s patented technology called *StarTags, a custom link within any type of post that can be used to sell or buy products and services. Brabble is perfectly designed for mobile use, but more importantly, the app places front and center the importance of integrating social media use and commerce and making it easy for Brabble users to sell and buy products with their social media connections.
As the social commerce phenomenon enters the forefront of online sales, and as new features and options are developed with regularity, setting up a profile on a social network and hoping that your customers will notice is no longer enough — businesses that use apps and technology combine e-commerce with social media will have a leading hand in their marketplaces.
