With social shopping, also known as social commerce, the goal is to facilitate the same sensations of discovery and inspiration that consumers experience while browsing traditional retail outlets, but within the context of social media.

Let’s go deeper into the importance of social shopping and how to integrate social commerce into your marketing tactics by focusing on Facebook and Instagram.

So, what exactly is social shopping?

To put it briefly, social shopping is the practise of selling goods via social media.

As an illustration, consider Instagram. A retailer’s only option for attracting customers on social media used to be to post attractive photographs of their wares and provide a clickable link in their profile that directed customers to an external website. To put it another way, if you wanted to promote your e-commerce firm on Instagram, you had to get people to click away from the app and into your website. The great majority of Instagrammers would never agree to do anything like that.

Until recently, this was the only option to direct Instagram visitors to your website.

When you tell Instagram users to close the app and visit your website, you’re generating something called friction. The sales funnel, which represents the path taken by potential customers on their journey to become paying customers, is best seen as a road.

What social shopping is all about is luring social media users to your online store and making it simple for them to make a purchase.

The Best Apps for Social Shopping

In 2023, Instagram and Facebook, its parent firm, rule the social shopping roost. That’s why we’re going to zero down on leveraging these two social applications for social commerce.

Facebook as a retail social network

If there is a social media site that is in the front of social shopping, it is Instagram. Nonetheless, for ease of discussion, let’s start with its parent business, Facebook: If you wish to share shoppable content on Instagram, you must be a Facebook advertiser.

The Outward Appearance

If you’re a regular Facebook user, you’ve probably seen shoppable material in your News Feed and in your friends’ Stories, even if you aren’t aware of it.

You’re sitting at your computer, perusing Facebook, when you notice an organic post made by Nike. You halt because, naturally, you care about how you compare to that person and want to achieve the same level of awesomeness. And then you notice that Nike has tagged a whole bunch of their things in here.

The sneakers have caught your eye, so you head on over to Nike’s official site to find out more. Perhaps you make the purchase there and then. Consumers seldom make such a swift decision, but it does happen. Perhaps, more likely, you lay it to rest and think about it in the morning. In the morning when you go into Facebook, Nike remarkets you with an even more enticing ad for the same pair of sneakers. You fall for their strategy and buy the shoes.

Where to Begin?

It’s excellent if your company already has a Facebook profile. Unless you already have one, you should probably create one. When that is done, make sure the Shopping template is active for your page. Choose Templates and Tabs from the left-hand menu after clicking Settings in the upper-right corner.

Finally, to modify your current template, go to the button to the right of it labelled Edit and choose the option labelled Shopping.
Because you’re using the Shopping theme, a new tab titled Shop has appeared on the left side of your website. To proceed, please choose that.

From here, Facebook will inquire as to the fundamentals of your online store, such as your location, the products you offer, the preferred method of payment, and so on.

Fortunately, introducing a new product is a breeze. The final step in creating a shoppable Facebook presence is to label goods in organic posts. The process of linking a picture or video featuring your items to your Facebook store is as easy as opening an image or video, selecting the Tag Products icon, and tagging your products with their titles.

Instagram as a social purchasing platform

Congratulations! Using a social shopping approach, you have successfully simplified your Facebook sales funnel. Visitors who have been enjoying your organic content may now readily peruse your wares and make purchases.

The best part is that after you have set up your Facebook store, you can also make your Instagram account shoppable. Please, share your thoughts with me.

The Outward Appearance

Much like Facebook, the reasoning for this is straightforward. Brands will tag their items in organic content as you read through your feed and browse through Stories.

You may get additional information by visiting the app’s in-game product details page. The link takes you directly to the retailer’s site for the product in question. It’s worth saying again:

It only takes two mouse clicks. So, that settles it. Remove the rubbing!

The day is coming when you won’t even have to exit the Instagram app to buy products from your favourite companies. At the time of writing, just a handful of prominent firms had access to Instagram’s new Checkout feature, which reduced friction for businesses by allowing them to sell to customers without their leaving the app.

All but one product can be tagged per Story post, although the approach is otherwise identical to that used with regular content. But if you want to tag more goods, it’s easy enough to just add more entries to your Story.

Where to Begin?

The good news is that you have already taken the first step towards making Instagram into a shop if you have a Facebook store. The next step is to access your account’s settings, change your profile type to “business,” and link your account to your Facebook page.

After that, you should enter Facebook’s Advertising Management. To access the Catalogs section of the Assets column, click on the corresponding icon in the upper left corner.
Review of your account will commence once you’ve linked your Instagram to the catalogue your Facebook store is utilising. This will likely take a few days. After your Instagram store has been verified, you may begin tagging goods from your catalogue in posts and Stories.