Twitter Drops Buy Button, We Triple Down on Social Commerce

If the news of Twitter dropping their buy button has you worried, don’t let it. The shift shows that although users are more than ready to engage with brands on Twitter there is still plenty of opportunity across it and other social platforms to get them to convert into customers.

— By Eric Mayville, Co-CEO and founding partner of Wondersauce.

Twitter might not be positioned for wholly integrated commerce as well as Instagram is, but it still lets you jump start converting users into customers.

As a company that builds ecommerce infrastructure and uses social to drive customer engagement, we know a conversion will close more efficiently if you’ve built rock-solid ecommerce or brand infrastructure, created the right content, and understand the importance of engaging with your audience throughout the conversion cycle.

Social platforms are still incredibly focused on commerce, and that means that we are quickly heading towards a world with fully integrated social commerce. It’s time to dive deep on your efforts in social to push commerce and conversion and then watch those investments pay off as users come to expect this behavior in their different social feeds.

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more give marketers better access to their current and future customers than any other medium in history. The platforms also continue to build new tools for targeting a brand’s user base and collect critical data to inform future business decisions by brands.

To triple down on the opportunity today you need to focus on three areas:

1. Infrastructure
   Investing in infrastructure enables businesses to convert no matter where the sale starts. This will be true even as fully integrated social commerce grows. Users on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are currently there to focus on social behaviors. Introducing a buy button in a social feed still requires an element of lifting to move that user into purchase mode. Get out of your user’s way when you drive them to your owned platforms by excluding superfluous content, non-expected interaction models, and unclear or too many calls to action. Aside from ensuring straight-forward and solid user experience your infrastructure needs to focus on performance. Social platforms deliver data incredibly quickly whether on LTE, 3G or a fiber connection. If you aren’t delivering your data close to or as fast as social networks are then you’ve completely lost an opportunity for converting a user into a customer. Regardless of whether you are using a combination of techniques to improve page load (asynchronous JavaScript loading, WebP images, etc.) or if you have made sites conform to Accelerated Mobile Pages guidelines, the effort must be made to deliver access to your platforms faster.
2. Content
   All great marketing starts with great content. Content that doesn’t get in the way of the product. Content that resonates directly with your customers. We have the ability to target and place content in extremely specific places with today’s tools which leads us to creating specific content for those distinct channels and audience segments. A/B testing for optimal conversion helps quickly identify where we can and should focus our creative dollars. This is a non-stop loop that you constantly work on to stretch each cent spent on your content.
3. Engaging your Audience
   Conversion cycles don’t end at the sale. Social platforms have been opening up new tools to brands, publishers, and agencies to create a means to extend our ability to engage with customers. Bots for Facebook and Twitter help us automate the top of the funnel, engage immediately post conversion, and keep all of the appropriate messaging in one place should the customer look to engage the brand for any issues (positive or negative) with their purchase.

Today’s successful social commerce starts in a user’s feed then closes quickly on an intuitively designed and optimized brand page. In the near future the entire cycle will become more wholly integrated.

Pairing strong brand infrastructure, iterative content strategy, and thoughtful customer engagement tools with a smarter approach to sending media dollars to these platforms allows you to take an active approach to marketing that is poised to convert with your customers now and into the near future.

Wondersauce is the new breed of advertising agency. We are focused on the complete customer journey and helping our clients understand the most relevant ways to reach their audience. Whether it’s digital, traditional, social, mobile, campaigns, marketing, point of sale, video, etc — we specialize in understanding your business and recommending the most responsible and cost-effective ways to achieve your goals.