Does social work for e-commerce?

[max.favilli]

So, social these days is hot. But is there anyone who can report some figure about a real, documented, analytically documented, success in using social for e-commerce?

There's a lot of presentations like this one saying it's great, it's a big impact, etc...

But how? And what about figures of sales, or traffic, or something you can measure... Which had a significant spike thanks to a social network attempt?

I am asking because I tried myself to use facebook for e-commerce, and we tried a lot:

• like and share buttons on content (pointing to the url of the content)
• like and share button on homepage (linked to the fan page)
• regular (three times a day) content being published on fanpage, original quality content (guidelines on products, independent test), well crafted (copy including catchy questions), original images designed by a graphic designer following all facebook guideline (smiling people, plain background)
• facebook ad campaign to increase likes (target audience = fans of brands sold)
• facebook ad remarketing
• facebook integration on the website publishing (with user consent) product reviews, buying action, website reviews, on their wall/user-feed (all with dynamically generated images showing happy smiling faces, product bought and catchy phrase)

After 6 months and around 15k euro spent the result is:

• above 10k likes on fanpage
• above 1k likes on content pages
• orders originated by fan page negligible (less than 10)
• orders originated by facebook ads negligible (less than 80 with a coverage of 2.5M users, declining through time with 75% of the orders in the first two months and less than 5 on the sixth month)
• orders originated by remarketing negligible (less than 10 with a coverage of 7k users)
• orders originated by customer reviews... so and so... 8 orders out of 300 customer reviews (coverage is unknown but 15 out of 300 would be a decent 2.5% CR even with just 300 users seeing the reviews)

My conclusion is either we are really dumb at using social for e-commerce, or we wasted our time...

Anyone had some experience to share?

[max.favilli]

Ok, so, the case studies cited in the article you linked:

Naked pizza (http://www.squaremartinimedia.com/twitter-business-case-study-naked-pizza/)

The only numbers they mention are these:

So what is the ROI for Naked Pizza using twitter?  Well the company’s first twitter only promotion on April 23 resulted in 15% of total sales, with 90% of those being NEW CUSTOMERS!  On May 29 twitter set a store sales record with the bulk of the traffic coming directly from twitter.  How much?  68.60% of the total sales came from customers who stated “I’m calling from twitter”!

15% of total sales from twitter on April 23, total? counting brick&mortar sales as well? It doesn't tell how many twitter followers they have, what was the cost to collect those followers, they are not saying what is the CPA, the CR, they are not giving any metric to value if it was a real success or not.

In the same article when it talks about Dell case study is not linking to any real case study, but I did some google to search for one and I found this other article: http://www.informationweek.com/desktop/dell-makes-$3-million-from-twitter-related-sales/d/d-id/1080465?

It's rather old; it's state the big success of Dell have been 3 million USD revenue attributed to Twitter, from 2007 to 2009, with a total of 600.000 followers. I have no idea what is Dell average order value, let's assume it's 500 USD, it means a CR of 1% which is not all that bad, but we don't know the cost of generating those 600.000 followers.

Also when they refer to Whole Food case (http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/reaching-millions-with-twitter-the-whole-foods-story/) they do not mention any CR or CPA or figure, Whole Food is saying they use Twitter and Facebook for customer care, they get in touch with customers, which is reasonable, but no sales. They got 1.7 million followers, which is an astonishing number, but they are a beloved brand, it's not hard to imagine they attract a lot of existing customers.

I still wish I could find someone with some figures showing a real success story.

[max.favilli]

That's also my conclusion. That's an e-commerce for car tires, which is not a sexy product people enjoy talking about on FB.

[wilreynolds]

What kind of ecommerce business?  I ask because I have a client who in the next 2-3 years is projected to make more from pinterest than natural search (assuming unbranded).  Maybe given your audience FB isn't the best place? Just thinking out loud here.

[max.favilli]

We tried custom audience as well, I should edit the question stressing it's included in the remarketing we did. Thanks for the links I am going to study them now.

[danatanseo]

Hi! Okay, first, here's the hard data you seek:

http://beingyourbrand.com/2012/10/21/social-media-case-studies-twitter-successes-to-learn-from/

And then this, Facebook custom audiences....I don't understand why more marketers aren't using these:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34213/How-to-Use-Facebook-s-Custom-Audiences-Feature-for-More-Strategic-Ad-Targeting.aspx