Social Commerce: A Guide to Shoppable Features on Social Media

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Now more than ever, people are online shopping rather than making a trip to their local store for many reasons. Mainly, it’s easy and you can shop from the safety of your home and the comfort of your own couch. From newbies, like TikTok, to the popular Pinterest, our favorite platforms are making social commerce easier than ever with even more ways to purchase. Read on for a roundup of some of the shoppable features available on each platform.

Facebook and Instagram both have shoppable features like product tags.  With tagged products, users will be driven directly to important information about an item tagged in a social post by linking to a product catalog. 

Facebook Shops allows brands to create a customizable collection to showcase products making an easy social commerce experience for the consumer. It is a “discovery-oriented” shopping experience that users access via the “Shop” tab.  This can be set up from your Facebook Business page and customized using Commerce Manager. Note: You may need to create a Commerce account in Commerce Manager before getting started. 

Just like Facebook Shops, Shops on Instagram is a native shopping experience for consumers. With shopping ads on the brand’s profile, in Feed, or in Stories, users can complete their purchases using the in-app browser or through Instagram Checkout without even leaving the app.  Both Facebook and Instagram Shops are customizable, easy to set up, and help brands reach new and existing customers with shopping intent.

Facebook Pay is also now available on Instagram in the United States and offers a secure way to shop across the family of apps. 

Next up is Pinterest, a popular spot for social commerce – especially with the holidays approaching. Business profiles can create shoppable Product Pins that contain pricing information, availability, and product information. 

Businesses can also create a Shop experience by featuring their shoppable products on their profile. Shops are set up and managed with Catalogs. 

Additionally, Pinterest recently added new tools for social commerce, including a new merchant storefront profile which allows business profiles to “transform their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups, and dynamically-created recommendations.”

Even YouTube is stepping up their social commerce game by adding a more shoppable ad format. This new format makes videos more shoppable by expanding the CTA buttons on video ads to drive traffic to specific product pages. By syncing your Google Merchant Center feed to the ads,  this format will create a browsable display of your featured products.  

TikTok is growing more popular and also working social commerce into the platform’s abilities. The social platform recently partnered with Shopify to create in-app shopping features. With this partnership, brands can create and run their TikTok marketing campaigns from the Shopify dashboard after installing the TikTok channel app through the Shopify app store. After doing this, brands will still have access to all the functions from their TikTok Business Ads Manager.  Brands can create a TikTok Pixel to track actions, like users visiting their site, adding an item to their cart, and completing their order. Brands can also create in-feed shoppable video ads using ad templates designed specifically for commerce. 

Snapchat has a couple of different options available for shopping. As a business, you can create a Product Catalog with the products available on your site. With a Product Catalog, you can create shoppable Product Catalog Ads. These can be either Story Ads, Single Image, Video, or Collection Ads. 

Collection Ads allow brands to feature a series of products in tappable tiles that allow Snapchatters to browse and buy directly from the app. Single Image or Video Ads allow users to swipe up to one location or product on your site. Story Ads appear as a branded tile in Snapchat’s Discover section. These will showcase 3-20 images or videos. 

Have questions about social commerce or how to correctly implement shoppable features for your brand? Contact us! Our team of social media marketing experts is happy to help.

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