As social platforms make it increasingly easier to manage financial transactions directly through their services, retailers are realizing they can use them for far more than marketing activities. In fact, social commerce represents a huge opportunity to convert and grow revenue.

To understand how to sell using social commerce, read on.

What is Social Shopping or Social Commerce?

For everyday consumers, social media continues to be a place they come to share photos and videos with their family and friends. While brands initially established their own accounts to advertise products and direct them back to their own eCommerce stores, social commerce means they are now using these platforms to provide a seamless digital shopping experience.

Social commerce sales are forecast to reach $8.5 trillion globally by 2030. Clothing is expected to be the fastest-growing category in this space, representing 18% of social commerce sales by 2025. In the U.S. alone, 77% pursue social shopping at least once per week.

The first step in developing a shoppable storefront on social media is to ensure you can easily connect your product catalog to social platforms where your customers are browsing. Product feed management makes this far easier to accomplish and scalable across multiple social services.

At the same time, you should become familiar with the unique requirements and social shopping opportunities each platform offers.

Top Social Commerce Platforms

Approaching social media as a brand is a lot different than what you might have experienced as a consumer. You’re not just sharing content broadly to the world but taking advantage of channels within each service that can maximize your social commerce sales.

These are some best practices specific to the most popular platforms.

Mastering Facebook Social Commerce

The volume of consumers shopping on Facebook is expected to reach more than 64.6 million in 2024, making it the largest social commerce platform. To reach that audience:

Leverage Facebook Shops

Facebook offers a shoppable storefront where retailers can create collections of their products based on a theme, such as seasonable apparel. Setting up a Facebook Shop allows you to display your brand’s name, logo, ratings and other details in addition to products. It’s also easy for users to discover Facebook Shops through their fields or via a dedicated tab and follow it and make purchases.

Use Dynamic Ads

No one has time to make thousands of individual ads to promote every product in their catalog. Facebook’s Dynamic Ads address this by allowing you to promote your entire catalog while also delivering relevant product recommendations to Facebook users based on their interests.

Engage with Facebook Live

Retailers have often used the power of a live in-store event to attract shoppers and give them a closeup look at their featured products. Facebook Live offers a way to do the exact same thing but on a global scale. Showcase items with live models, answer questions from potential buyers and offer the kind of authentic connection that consumers crave.

Optimize for Mobile

It may have started in the days when desktops were still the dominant device for browsing the web, but most consumers are probably scrolling the Facebook app on their smartphone. Make sure you don’t disappoint them by ensuring you’re offering fast page loads and adjusting text and images to display on smaller screens.

Feed integration: Facebook Shops and Dynamic Ads need to properly convey every important detail about the items you’re selling. This includes not only names but pricing, images, descriptions, SKUs and availability statuses. Automating Facebook product feed management will render everything consumers need to know in the right format, every time.

Instagram Social Shopping: Everything You Need to Know

Whether gazing at photos or watching Reels, Instagram also commands a sizable social shopping audience, with 46.8 million expected to make purchases there in 2024. Instagram is also well established as a home for highly engaging fashion and lifestyle content, making it an ideal digital destination for many eCommerce brands. There are plenty of ways to attract customers:

Utilize Instagram Shopping

There’s no shorter path to purchase than “see it, buy it,” which is exactly what Instagram Shopping was designed to offer U.S. retailers. Posts will include one-click access to view collections, detailed product pages or simply buy directly through the app. You’ll need to set up a business profile on Instagram and comply with Instagram’s merchant agreement to get approved. You’ll then be able to tag up to 20 products and shops in a photo feed post, 10 photos and videos in a carousel post.

Create Shoppable Posts

Consumers have come to recognize the little shopping bag icon that identifies Shoppable Posts on Instagram, which allow them to streamline the process of ordering a product they want. Bear in mind that they are likely looking at multiple brands on Instagram at any given moment, and Shoppable Posts let them stay in the app even as they make purchases. You can enhance your Shoppable Posts by not only creating enticing images, but adding important context such as sizing, fit or styling.

Leverage Influencers

Instagram is a great example of a platform where users are building up audiences that dwarf that of many brands. These creators are also called influencers because consumers pay close attention to products they recommend and endorse. Partnering with influencers can help draw more attention to your Shoppable Posts and other Instagram content to boost your social commerce sales.

Use Instagram Stories

Instagram may have originally been focused on photography, but today users can create Stories that blend images, video, text and special effects. Brands can do the same thing, illustrating how their products could be worn or used in a particular context or locale. Instagram Stories are also ideal for conveying the kind of key messages that were once reserved for expensive TV spots, while also offering a fast and easy way to take the next step and buy items.

Feed Integration: Developing a shoppable storefront on Instagram requires adding details to its Commerce Manager platform. This includes either connecting your existing catalog or creating a new one. That could be a laborious and error-prone job without a product feed management solution that instantly transmits the right data and accelerates Instagram’s review process.

Social Shopping on Pinterest: Your Secret Weapon

Whether you’re decorating your home or creating a board full of outfit ideas, Pinterest is the ultimate way to curate ideas and products that speak to your individual style. No wonder 85% of Pinterest users have made a purchase based on a pin. Make sure your brand is among those benefiting:

Optimize Product Pins

Every pin you promote as a brand should tell a story. This not only includes visual storytelling with images but metadata such as the keywords you use to describe them. Also make sure to tag across multiple categories where appropriate to maximize discoverability and form product groups with the same care you’d put complementary products on a table in a physical store.

Use Rich Pins

Pinterest recognizes that product information should never stay static. That’s why it offers Rich Pins, which automatically sync data from your website. This means you can have the latest ingredients in a Recipe Rich Pin, or updated pricing and availability for Product Rich Pins.

Create Themed Boards

Pinterest boards don’t have to be random assortments of products. Much like an in-store experience, you’ll provide a better experience for customers by organizing pins based on broader similarities, customer interests and needs. A good example might be a vacation-themed board that includes everything you should buy before setting off on your next getaway.

Engage with Visual Search

Shopping inspiration can come from anywhere, but the hard work comes when you need to track down something that appeals to you. Visual search technologies ease that journey by allowing consumers to simply point at an item and look it up online. Pinterest Lens, for instance, can drive more consumers to your pins when you have multiple optimized images of your products with accurate data.

Feed Integration: Pinterest allows brands to add 50 different data sources, but doing so manually requires many steps, and Pinterest requires data be updated every seven days. This could become a full-time job without an automated feed management solution that can handle this on a scheduled basis.

TikTok Social Commerce: Go Viral with Your Sales

Some come for the singing and dancing. Some come for the memes. There are also plenty of people who visit TikTok for both types of content – in addition to hunting for their next luxury item. More than 55 million U.S. consumers shopped on TikTok in 2023, either through links in the app or directly on the platform. Now is the time to meet your customers here as well. Here’s how:

Create Engaging Content

TikTok first became known for the extreme brevity of its content, as well as a sense of humor that tended to skew towards younger consumers. As the platform grows, its audience will inevitably become more diverse, but the same lighthearted and fun-loving spirit remains. Instead of a hard product pitch, try to develop clips that put what you sell into an unconventional environment, or answer some of the funniest questions you’ve ever been asked by existing customers. If you know some of your loyal customers well, see if they’ll be part of clips that are part of viral trends, such as posts with the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag.

Leverage TikTok Shopping

TikTok Shop incorporates many of the features of other social shopping platforms, including the ability to be featured on a Shop tab, in-feed and live shopping as well as product showcases. Of course you’ll have to adhere to TikTok’s community guidelines and TikTok Shop policies to set up this kind of shoppable storefront after signing up to its seller program.

Partner with Creators

Like Instagram, TikTok is filled with creators who have mastered the art of short-form video. Involve them anywhere from launch campaigns and unboxing opportunities to clips that let them explain to their followers why your products are essential items.

Use Hashtag Challenges

TikTok is perhaps the most “gamified” social media platform where brands can challenge users to compete with one another to create the best content. Examples here could include clips that demonstrate the best use of your products to bring your company’s slogan to life in a new way.

Feed Integration: TikTok suggest brands can create new catalogs, upload products from an online file or use a template. There’s actually another, better way: leverage the power of a proven product feed management solution to ensure every attribute is included and leave your

2024’s Trends in Social Commerce

Social commerce is an ever-moving target. As platforms continue to compete with each other for consumers’ attention, we’ll see them experiment with new technologies and introduce features to drive even more immersive engagement.

Given giants such as Meta not only own Facebook and Instagram but WhatsApp, for instance, expect to see further integration of social commerce within messaging apps that allow consumers to get their contacts’ opinions on their purchases. Evolving mobile device hardware could allow social commerce via augmented and virtual reality. Other areas, such as live shopping, are still nascent and poised for further expansion.

Integrating Suvae.org for Optimal Social Commerce

Regardless of how social commerce evolves, having a product feed management solution in place is a great strategy for future-proofing your brand.

Take Suvae.org, which not only allows brands to manage product catalogs on social platforms but create enriched feeds tailored to their needs. Flexible configurations means brands can also stay ahead of channel requirements as they change, and the platform allows performance monitoring and the ability to keep track of inventory statuses.

These kinds of capabilities all support a social shopping experience based on improved data accuracy and simplified, automated feed management.

Your shoppable storefront should be available everywhere. Contact Suvae.org to learn more about how we can help grow your social commerce sales.

The post Social Shopping 2024: Your Ultimate Guide & Best platforms appeared first on Suvae.org.

This type of buyer journey happens more often than you think. To prevent your business from missing out on the sales from these customers, include Facebook Retargeting Ads as a part of your Advantage+ catalog campaigns (formerly Dynamic Product Ads).

Retargeting reduces cart abandonment by 6.5%. (MotoCMS)

Retargeting ads work by reminding customers about products they’ve previously visited or bought on your website, mobile app, Marketplace, or Facebook/Instagram Shop. This popular marketing tactic helps retailers increase the performance of shopping campaigns on Facebook.
Find out more about the benefits of Facebook retargeting ads and how to get more engagement from personalized and up-to-date product catalog campaigns.

Benefits of Running Facebook Retargeting Ads

Just like getting a regular oil change for your car to get the best performance, running Facebook retargeting ads is an essential part of getting the most ROI from your Facebook Catalog Ads (Advantage+) media spend.

Benefits include:

• Pushing abandoned cart users to buy
• Re-engaging previous customers
• Converting customers with high intent
• Increasing brand awareness
• Acquiring new customers

How to Retarget on Facebook with Catalog Ads

A Facebook Retargeting Campaign can only be done if you’ve already run previous campaigns. With a Facebook pixel on your website or App you can build a retargeting audience to use for future ads.
The following steps from the Facebook website will help you create a retargeting campaign from start to finish.

Step 1: Create Your Retargeting Pixel

If you already have a pixel installed on your website and you’ve run previous campaigns then skip to Step 2.

1. Go to Events Manager.
2. Click Connect Data Sources and select Web.

3. Select Meta Pixel and click Connect.
4. Add your Pixel Name.

5. Enter your website URL to check for easy setup options and click Check.

6. Choose “Conversions API Meta Pixel” OR “Meta Pixel only” and click Continue.

7. Once you’ve created your Meta Pixel, you’re ready to put the Pixel code on your website.

1. Manually add Pixel code to website
2. Use a partner integration
3. Email instructions

8. After you add the Meta Pixel base code to your website you can set up events to measure the actions you care about, like making a purchase.

Step 2: Develop Your Facebook Catalog Ad Set with Retargeting Ads

1. Go to Meta Ads Manager and create your Advantage+ catalog ad or open an existing one.
2. In your Ad set, find the Audience section and choose to Retarget ads to target people who interacted with your products on and off Facebook.
3. Select a retargeting option, update the corresponding number of days and choose the products to include.Note: If you choose Custom combination, you can specify what audience interactions to include or exclude. For example, you could include people who added products to their cart in the last 45 days and exclude people who purchased products in the last 45 days.

Step 3: Use Facebook Conversion Tracking to Measure Results

1. Create an Ads Manager account.
2. Run one or more Facebook Ad Campaigns.
3. Go back to your Ads Manager.
4. Select Campaigns, Ad Sets or Ads, depending on what you want to measure.
5. Select the Columns dropdown menu.
6. Select Customize Columns and select the boxes next to the actions that matter to you.
7. Click Apply and you’ll see these columns in the table.

Retargeting Platforms and Tools for Running Facebook Retargeting Ads

If you’re an eCommerce retailer looking to scale your retargeting campaigns, there are a variety of platforms that can help you streamline your advertising.
Here are some popular ones that larger retailers use to run their campaigns.

• ADRoll
  ADRoll allows you to use one platform to execute all of your retargeting campaigns but it also helps to streamline your marketing operations, identify and reach visitors, build brand awareness, gather insights, create ads that match your goals, and grow and scale.

• CRITEO
  Criteo Dynamic Retargeting can help you increase your campaign performance across platforms like Facebook and Instagram with their granular view of each shopper’s complete web journey and real-time purchase intent, from mobile and in-app to desktop.

• RTBHouse
  The RTB House engine identifies potential buyers and boosts performance using 1:1 personalized retargeting. Their engine boasts up to 50% more efficient than standard Machine Learning AI-based platforms.

Improve your Facebook Retargeting Ads and Ad Performance Over Time

The devil is in the details when it comes to increasing the performance of your Facebook Retargeting ads. If your previous campaign fell short of your marketing goals, get to the root of the problem to improve your ROI for next time.

To help you gain a better understanding of how to interpret your results, ask yourself these three questions

1. How did this campaign compare to previous campaigns?
   • Were there different products?
   • Was the time of year the same?
   • Were there similar promotions?
2. Did the ads have all of the correct product information displayed in an enticing format to encourage a purchase?
3. Did you have enough personalized audience data to retarget in a way that would achieve your goal, like converting users who abandoned their cart?

A lesser-known but extremely important question involves the quality and structure of the product data that impact the effectiveness of your ads.

When it comes to advertising your catalog in different countries with multiple catalogs, product information like price, sale price, currency, and language may be different in each country. Take these factors into consideration to develop a multi-country and multi-currency feed strategy based on the campaign’s target country.

Other factors that affect ad performance are the keywords and placement of product differentiators in areas like your product title and description. Optimizing these parts of your product feed allows you to position your products in the best possible way to your audience.

This is where Suvae.org’s technology can help. The platform optimizes the product data used in your Facebook catalog ads. Having better-optimized product data leads to better results from your retargeting ads.

Our SaaS platform connects directly with popular retargeting engines to run multi-channel product catalog ads that get seen by your intended customers. All you need to do is provide your product catalog, and our dedicated Customer Success Manager will take care of everything else to ultimately achieve your goals.

Discover how you can create powerful Retargeting Ads with Suvae.org.

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New, emerging solutions, like Facebook Shops, now have enhanced catalog criteria that you’ll need to adhere to if you want to stay ahead and significantly expand your reach across multiple Facebook commerce solutions.

Currently, the data that is available to you in your eCommerce platform is not substantial enough to truly differentiate your products. And with insufficient product information, the whole process of creating product catalogs for marketplaces can be quite challenging and time-consuming. But there’s a solution

Let’s take a look at how Facebook Shops have updated its catalog criteria, and what that means for your business.

How to work with Facebook-enhanced catalogs

Facebook Enhanced Catalogs enable you to place your products at the forefront of your audience’s social feeds with a far more personalized user experience.
You can effectively reach your target groups through your preferred social channels, by strategically placing highly relevant products for the end user based on more detailed criteria.

The importance of rich data and how it improves shopping experiences

The more detailed information you include in the Facebook Shops enhanced catalog, the better chance of your products being discovered. With the new enhanced catalog, you can expand your criteria from core basics to specifics.

Generic Product Catalog:

• Product title
• Product description
• Product images
• Product status
• Specific product brand

Facebook Shops Enhanced Catalog:
With the new criteria, Facebook Shops expands on the generic catalog criteria by adding:

• Title
• Description
• Availability
• Gender
• Color
• Intended audience for product usage
• Material(s) used
• Product size
• Other physical attributes such as product pattern
• Link
• Brand
• Price
• Sale price
• Sale price effective date
• Size
• Custom Label
• Short Description
• Additional variant attribute

Facebook Shop’s Full List of Enhanced Criteria

Facebook Shop’s Apparel-Specific Criteria

Accessing additional product data can be quite difficult, especially when it is spread out across various data sources. In some cases, you may have to undergo a manual process of retrieving and consolidating the additional product data to create your Facebook Shop catalog.

Of course, being able to automate the entire process of merging different data from multiple sources would ultimately mean quicker and more accurate product catalogs. These are compatible with the new Facebook Shops criteria, which can then easily be submitted through the built-in catalog manager.

Improve your product’s discoverability on Facebook Shops

To lead in Social Commerce means to adopt and master new emerging social platforms, as well as stay on top of innovations like the enhanced catalogs from Facebook Shops.
It is in your best interest to always know where your data is stored, be it in your existing eCommerce solution, your Product Information Management System (PIM), or through the process of Master Data Management (MDM).
Working with a knowledgeable technical partner on bringing these sources together and effectively merging them into a compatible and compliant feed for Facebook Shops can help you increase your product visibility across Facebook.

Suvae.org platform helps you by pulling information from multiple data sources and optimizing them into a consolidated feed that works for Facebook Shops, saving you time. by removing the hassle of manual optimization.
Using the platform gives you a leg up by being the first to create detailed, high-quality product feeds for your digital storefronts, so you can better promote your products across all Facebook commerce options.

Increase your product discoverability and improve conversion rates through Product Feed Optimization.

Book Your Free Consultation Today!

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Facebook Product Catalogs Set Up

Describing how to set up Facebook Product Catalogs is easy. Facebook Business Manager states “A catalog is a container that holds information about the items in your inventory”.

The catalog is connected to your product sets used for ads. Because Catalogs, Product Feeds (data sources), and Product Sets are all tied together, we’re going to review all 3 topics so you can feel confident your ads will contain the RIGHT products. Let’s go through this process, step-by-step.

Step 1 – Get Started with Marketing Objectives

Catalog setup starts when you create an Ad campaign in Facebook Ad Manager. A pop-up screen appears where you choose your campaign’s purpose under “Conversion”.
Choose the Conversion Type “Catalog Sales”.

Step 2 – Create your Campaign

The second step is to create a campaign name and decide which catalog to use as a data source for your ads.

If the catalog field is NOT already pre-populated in the drop-down menu, you need to add one in Catalog Manager

Click “Create new catalog” at the bottom of your catalog list. If there are no catalogs, Facebook will prompt you to create one.

Step 3 – Create a Catalog

First, select “E-commerce” as the business category.

Select “Upload Product Info” to upload a product feed. We’re going to focus on companies that are using feeds and not connecting directly to an eCommerce Platform.

Your business name should appear in the business dropdown and this is where you name your Catalog. The catalog is just a container with various data sources.
The best practice is to use a naming convention such as “brand-market”. This naming convention easily conveys which data source should be assigned to a campaign.

Once you hit next, your catalog container has been created and is displayed in the top left of the screen under “Current Catalog”. Now you need to fill it with products.

Go to “Product Data Sources” in the left navigation and click the blue “Add Products” button.

This part is where many people get confused. Keep reading to get more details and answers.

Step 4 – Configure your Product Data Source

There are two options to configure the data source.

1. Upload your data source manually 
2. Set an automatic file upload schedule (this is the one we use with our clients)

Set Automatic File Upload Schedule

When you select this option more fields appear below. Use a product feed as your data source. How do you do this?
Add the URLs and passwords for your product feeds. If you don’t have your URLs and passwords and you are using a feed provider, request this information for each of your feeds.

If you need your feed provider to be able to attach the feeds to your catalogs, you might be asking yourself the following questions:

• “How do I grant my feed provider access to my Facebook Ads Manager?”
  Answer: Provide access to your feed partner in your Facebook Ads Manager settings by following these steps.

1. Go to the “Assign Partner” tab and grant access to the company
2. That company can provide access to the appropriate individuals by clicking on “Add People”
3. All the feed partner needs is the list of catalogs they can attach their correlating feed to
4. If you’re not able to provide the feed company access, source the URL, Username & Password from them to add the feed yourself

• How do I attach the Data Sources (Feeds) myself to a Catalog?
  Answer: As a representative of your company, you can add data sources (feeds) to the catalogs you’ve set up.

1. Go to the appropriate catalog and follow Facebook’s instructions.
2. Every catalog needs to have a feed URL with a username and password to access the feed from the provider.
3. The best practice is to have 1 catalog per market. For example, you would have a separate catalog and corresponding feed for each country.

Step 5 – Configure your Product Sets

Now it’s time to create your product sets to determine the products that will be used in your Facebook Dynamic Product Ads.

You need to name your Product Set and then define your rules according to various parameters in a drop-down list. Once you’ve defined the type of parameter then you can tell Facebook what to do with it in the example below.

You can add multiple product sets in this section.

The rest of the campaign setup is specific to your marketing goals. We’ll leave this to the marketing experts!

What Next?

This is where you create your Ads and Product Sets associated with a catalog. We’ll leave it up to your marketing department or agency to create the campaigns. As a product feed provider, the Suvae.org platform customizes each Facebook feed for each of your markets. If you are looking for a way to boost your Facebook product advertising, reach out to our team to set up a demo.

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As people spend more time on Facebook,  retailers must be where their customers are. So, if you are wondering how to increase the visibility of your products and better target the right customers on Facebook, look no further.
In this post, you’ll learn all you need to know about Facebook Remarketing, and how Facebook Dynamic Product Ads can help improve your remarketing strategy efforts.

What are Facebook Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)?

Dynamic Product Ads make it easy for merchants to get ads for relevant products in front of interested customers on Facebook. They let you scale the delivery of relevant ads to Facebook users by combining a product feed with an ad template that needs to be created just once.  Facebook automatically draws data from your product feed and populates the template with relevant products.  The choice of products that the viewer sees is based on the Facebook user’s past behavior on your website or app.  You are also able to reach new potential customers through the creation of lookalike audiences.

What do Dynamic Product Ads look like?

DPA’s are versatile and you can configure your ads to contain anywhere from 1 to 5 products.  Have a look at the examples below.

Single product ad: image_url=”1768″

Multi-product ad: image_url=”1770″

The ads can appear within the news feed as well as in the column on the right of the news feed.  When you set up the advertisement in Power Editor, you get to choose where your ad is shown.  You can even choose whether you want your ads to appear on mobile or desktop or both. (You can choose exactly where your ads can appear.)

How do Dynamic Product Ads work?

Essentially, Facebook Dynamic Product Ads use three elements:

• a product catalog updated constantly using a product data feed,
• a tracking pixel that tracks the behavior of target customers
• and a dynamic ad template.

The pixel tracks the behavior of customers such as product viewed, product added to cart, or product purchased.  Based on that behavior, Facebook selects product data from your catalog and populates the ad template before delivering the ad to the customer.  In this way, you can automatically show a product to someone that has viewed it on your website or added it to their basket but did not purchase it.

Alternatively, if someone has purchased on your website, you can show that person a set of products that are complementary to the product they bought. As well as displaying ads to people that have already interacted with you on your website you can also use Facebook’s similar audience function to target advertisements to new customers that have similar interests to your existing customers.

How do you set up DPA’s?

1. Set up Facebook Business Manager if you haven’t already done so.
2. Create a product catalog in Business Manager by following these instructions.
3. Set up a product feed to continually update your product catalog with fresh product data.  If you are a Suvae.org client, this part couldn’t be easier.  Just tell us you want to start using DPA’s and we’ll set up the feed for you.
4. Set up a Facebook Pixel to track events on your website.  Facebook has recently simplified things for advertisers with the introduction of the Facebook Pixel. This pixel combines the functions of their Custom Audience Pixel with those of their Conversion Tracking Pixel so advertisers need only to install a single pixel (more information on this can be found here).
5. Create your dynamic product template (for instructions click here).

Next Steps

Facebook Dynamic Product Ads provide an effective way to target interested customers with relevant ads.  Stay ahead of your competitors by enhancing your Facebook Dynamic Product Ads and driving more customers to your e-commerce website. Contact us for more information.

The post Facebook Dynamic Product Ads: Entice Users To Become Buyers appeared first on Suvae.org.