Social commerce may sound like a fun idea. As a user, you purchase items based off your friends likes and interests, or even directly from referrals of their own purchases.
And you would be pretty accurate with that assumption. Except think about how you might then purchase these items. Would you follow a link to a store? Follow a post URL to a landing page and they try to navigate to the store?
Facebook (the self-appointed Holy Grail of technological evolutionary change for our society) would love to make your timeline the one-stop shop for literally everything you could ever want in this world.
Facebook will be adding a "Buy" button within posts by companies, in order to make purchasing their products easier. For consumers, users and regular people this is a great thing, except for the increased ability to thin your wallet.
So how are companies going to approach this?
Specifically, many B2C industries will have to painstakingly create, modify and recreate their own eCommerce sites for optimal performance for the incoming Facebook hoards. Further, many companies measure their social media effectiveness on "Likes", "Retweets" and "Repins". Now, as social commerce becomes more popular, they can look to social media to directly improve the bottom line.
So, is social commerce really destined to be more popular? Facebook isn't the only agent of change looking to make this move. Twitter and various other social networks are going to take this angle and make social commerce not just an idea, but also a viable and valuable connection with an audience.
Now, we can talk all day about your social commerce strategy and how this new item on the table may be one you want to pick up.
But simply consider this post your heads up that something is coming. We are preparing for it, are you?