Facebook Commerce, Stipple Style
Published February 8, 2012Successfully leveraging the Facebook platform for e-commerce has proven to be quite challenging for brands. While many brands have hoards of fans, a recent Ehrenberg-Bass Institute study has shown that only 1% of fans actually engage with brands. With such low engagement levels as is, using Facebook for e-commece may seem like a foolish waste of time.
The perception of Facebook that users have is not that of a mall or marketplace – they want entertainment value in exchange for their time spent there. Community managers find images to be one of the most valuable means of engagement for Facebook marketing strategies. These images are the most effective way to engage fans into a conversation with a brand. Stipple can successfully monetize this aspect through Facebook apps. Brands can use Facebook for their e-commerce needs with no cost and the potential for high reward.
First, let’s see how Stipple reinvents the concept of an e-commerce app. The traditional e-commerce app is typically one that features individual items on top of each other. The Internet user has come to expect this from an e-commerce page, but ultimately, it is not what fans want from a Facebook brand page.
By incorporating e-commerce into an engaging photo through a meta-tag delivered through Stipple, the undertone of the e-commerce app changes – now it becomes “content discovery”, rather than “hard selling”. This creates an opportunity for fans to be exposed subtly to e-commerce, without being “in your face.” It simultaneously builds relationships and brand loyalty amongst fans through an interactive method. Fans do not see the sell as a pitch but rather they see it as an opportunity to play, interact, and learn more about a brand. Therefore, both engagement and e-commerce traffic increase simultaneously…the ROI that companies have been looking for all along in the social hemisphere.
Take a look at the following image as an example. By mousing over the image, you can see that there are links to 4 e-commerce items embedded along with a wide array of tags about relevant content. These extra tags transform the app from an explicit e-commerce page to a place for fans to come and explore the brand.
Photo courtesy of Natalie Cone
Brands can use Stipple tags to push individual products, as well. Community managers can focus their content creation strategies to incorporate individual products. This practice can be fun for the fans, and very rewarding for a brand.
To illustrate this point, let’s use the ever popular Facebook activity: the caption contest.
Let’s say a popular athletic shoe company is planning to release a new line of shoes. The brand can use an image caption contest with Stipple tags to drive traffic directly to the e-commerce location of the new shoes. When users investigate the tags within the Facebook app to see if their caption was one of the best, they will inevitably discover the e-commerce tag of the new product. Take a look at the image below to see how one of these apps might work:
Photo courtesy of Keith Allenson
Both of these images present e-commerce to viewers in a way that does not obnoxiously yell “BUY ME, BUY ME!”, yet have the same informative and functional qualities of any traditional e-commerce app. With Stipple, Facebook brand pages turn into a place where fans can come and interact with others rather than feel they are being force-fed products.
