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The Essential Social Playbook3 Steps To Turn Social Into Sales

Written by Blake Brysha

/ The Essential Social Playbook: 3 Steps To Turn Social Into Sales2

Share This:Social Into Sales


A Fundamental Shift in The Way We Do Business .....................

- A Brave, New, Social World- The Current State of Social Commerce

The Key Components of a Winning Social Strategy ..................

Step 1: Let Your Customers Do the Talking ...............................

Step 2: Broadcast Social Content to Boost Engagement, On-Site and Off ...............................................................

Step 3: Test, Measure, and Optimize ..........................................

Turn Social Into Sales Checklist ...................................................

About The Essential Social Suite..................................................

About PowerReviews ....................................................................

Appendix ........................................................................................

Table of Contents

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A Fundamental Shift in The Way We Do Business

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re either a marketing professional or business owner who understands that social is now an integral component of any successful e-commerce strategy. You recognize that there’s been a dramatic shift in the way brands and consumers are doing business online. You realize how important this is. But you may not be sure how to harness this social phenomenon to make it work for your business.

Social is changing the way customers interact, but social isn’t yet driving tangible business results, such as sales, and business fundamentals haven’t changed just yet. You’ve probably been experimenting with social. You may have created a Pinterest page, implemented the “Like” button, or even hired a social media team, but the only thing you’ve been able to measure to this point are “Likes” and followers. It’s a start, a good start, but you’re probably wondering when you’ll realize the return on all the time you’ve spent testing the waters. The good news is, you’re not alone... and we’re here to help.

In this eBook, we’re going to share the PowerReviews formula for effective social commerce, proven to drive meaningful business benefits. Validated by a network of more than 5,500 of the world’s best brands, we’ll share best practices and give you an inside look at how companies of all types have used the millions of conversations happening around their products, services, and brands to drive traffic, shares, sales, and more. We’ll provide a foundation that you can apply to your own business to start turning your social efforts into more sales immediately.

Bird Watching: A Primer We are big fans of data here at PowerReviews and, as a result, we’ve scatteredfun facts all throughout this playbook. We’re also strong proponents of sharing (naturally), so when you see this little bird icon next to a social stat thatyou find interesting, click it to easily share the stat with your Twitter followers.









A Brave, New, Social WorldSocial networking is a global phenomenon.

There’s no way around it. We all connect and share with our personal and business networks through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. We’ve seen revolutions in the Middle East and Africa organized and supported by social technology. And people are now spending nearly 25% of their time on social networks1.

Your customers are providing each other with an avalanche of rich, relevant and real-time recommendations, questions and answers, reviews, and content about your brand and products, and they’re doing so on a massive scale. So much so, in fact, that 1 million pieces of social content are created by consumers every 60 seconds2.

You’ve likely been experimenting in social. But let’s face it, the end goal is more traffic, conversions and sales... and “Likes” don’t equal sales. “Likes” don’t tap into any of the social conversations customers are sharing with each other around your brand. To quote Ad Age “There may be no actual engagement at all beyond the fleeting moment of the click.” According to a recent Booz & Company survey, 71% of social networking users said “liking,” a company on Facebook would have no impact on their propensity to buy from that company3.

You know you need to get in on this action around social, but where do you start? In this eBook, we’ll take a step-by-step approach to show you how to turn the thousands of conversations happening around your brand everyday into meaningful sales.






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OVERVIEW

The Key Components of a Winning Social Strategy





The Key Components of a Winning Social Strategy

The bad news: There is no such thing as a silver bullet in social. There’s not a Facebook app, Twitter promotion, or FourSquare challenge that will guarantee you results. The good news, however, is that we’ve identified and validated the 3 core components that must exist in a complete social strategy in order to find the social mix that will work for your brand and achieve success in social.

The following are the 3 key components that comprise a complete social strategy:

1. Customer Content

It all starts here. Social content is the fuel that drives the most valuable social benefits for your brand. Without critical mass of social content, it’s nearly impossible to realize success from your social campaigns.

To clarify, the social content we’re talking about isn’t company-authored tweets, pins, or even blog posts. You must have you have your own, native, social content engine, enabling your customers to initiate their own conversations around your products and brand. Customer reviews, user-generated images and videos, and Q&A are prime examples of native social content. This content—through its relevance, freshness, and sheer volume—makes you easier to find than your competition and turns more shoppers into buyers.

An effective social content engine will encourage high quality content and remove barriers to your customers contributing content. With the necessary volume of native, user-generated content, you’ll be fully realize the benefits of social, on-site and across the social web.









2. Social Engagement

Once you’ve got your content engine in place, the possibilities really open up and you’re able to leverage your social content in so many exciting ways. You can amplify that social content across the web and social networks, organically spreading your brand message and creating a network of links that point directly back to your product pages. You can also encourage customers to contribute and share even more by rewarding helpful behavior and giving them the tools needed to connect with your community of customers.

A successful engagement platform will create new customers, improve your on-site experience, and encourage brand advocacy, all based on your customers’ inherent desire to interact with your brand content and share thier experiences with their social networks.

3. Measurement

Lastly, and most importantly, you must have the ability to track and measure the success of everything you do in social. While most savvy companies have some incarnation of a content engine, and some even dabble in engagement, the vast majority of brands have no means of measuring how effective their efforts actually are. This may sound crazy, but it’s a very real problem with social marketing to date. You must have the ability to measure clicks, traffic, conversion, and sales associated with your social campaigns to fully understand how social activity is impacting your bottom line.

An effective social measurement platform will give you the ability to test and optimize your social initiatives to find the social programming mix that’s right for your brand.

If you’ve got any of the above in place currently, you’re off to an excellent start, but it can’t be stressed enough how important it is to have all 3 components working together cohesively, if you hope to achieve social commerce success.

In the subsequent sections, we’ll take a step-by-step look at Customer Content, Social Engagement, and Measurement, offering examples, tips, and real results from companies doing social commerce well today.







STEP 1

Let Your Customers Do The Talking





Step 1: Let Your Customers Do The Talking

In this day and age, most brands have some form of social content on their site, but the majority of it is usually created by a marketing department or social media manager. It probably goes without saying, authentic opinions shared by others are overwhelmingly more influential than a brand waxing poetic about themselves in marketing copy or advertising. In fact, only 25% of consumers trust advertising, while more than 90% trust peer reviews4.

It’s probably worth re-stating that in this eBook we’re discussing native social content, user-generated content that is originally generated and hosted on your own website. The following are a few examples of common native (on-site) social content types:

• Community Forums• Customer Questions & Answers• User-Generated Videos• Customer Reviews• User-Generated Image Galleries• Commenting/Voting Functionality

All provide unique benefits if implemented correctly, but If you’re looking for a place to start, consider this: Based on a 2011 study from the e-tailing group: Customers Reviews, Q&A, and Community Forums were the top 3 social tactics, respectively, that consumers say have the greatest impact on purchase decisions5. Example of Social Q&A answered by both

customers and staff support






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You’ve probably got at least one of these examples of social content live on your site but, if not, you really can’t afford to wait. Take a look at your brand goals, launch at least one of the noted social content types on your site immediately, and start experimenting on the path to finding the social mix that works for your business.

Benefits of On-Site Social ContentThe benefits of adding social content to your site have been proven many times over in recent years. To give you a taste of how powerful social content can be (or give you an idea for how your current social performance stacks up), consider the following.

1. Social Content Promotes Authenticity

Your customers expect user-generated content on your site. So much so, in fact, that 70% of Americans now say they look at product reviews before making a purchase6. Social content adds a level of authenticity to your brand that simply can’t be achieved with marketing copy. Furthermore, most consumers need to read 4-7 opinions before they feel confident enough to make a purchase decision7, so it’s important that you have critical mass of social content to keep them from having to look elsewhere for purchase validation.

2. Social Content Increases SEO & Traffic

Search optimization is critical component to any successful e-commerce strategy, though many brands neglect to even consider social content when it comes to their SEO strategy. The fact is, social content contains long tail keywords and natural language that search engines like Google love. Social content captures the words and phrases that show up when consumers search, and a no SEO strategy is complete without Social SEO. Social content can be so good for SEO, in fact, that brands with optimized social content see, on average, an increase of 50% in natural traffic8.






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3. Social Content Drives Sales A highly-rated product will increase the likelihood of purchase for 55% of consumers9. Customers want to read discussions, reviews, and feedback from people like them in order to make an informed purchase decision. In addition to increasing natural search traffic, brands typically see a 10% increase in conversion rate with the addition of social content10 to their site.

Do This NowIf you’re not currently live with some form of social content on your website, get the ball rolling and figure out what it’s going to take to launch something as soon as possible. Every day you sit without the ability for customers to contribute, you forfeit the thousands of conversations that could be driving significant benefits for your brand. Don’t miss the boat.

If you do currently have social content on your site, great. Remember that in order to be fully optimized, your content must all work together. Whatever you’ve got implemented needs to play nicely with your other components in order to maximize the return on your social efforts. Q&A should be integrated with customer reviews, reviews should be integrated with user-generated video, and so on and so forth.

Consider the following questions:

1. Do I currently have native social content on my site and is it easy for customers to contribute high-quality content?

2. Is my social content coverage enough to prevent my customers from looking elsewhere?

3. Can Google see my social content (you’d be surprised) and is it optimized?

4. Do I know my conversion rates before and after integrating social content and how they compare to industry benchmarks?

If you don’t already know the answer to all of the above, it’s recommended that you investigate and have a firm understanding of each before continuing on to the following sections.






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STEP 2

Broadcast Social Content to Boost Engagement, On-Site and Off





Step 2: Broadcast Social Content to Boost Engagement

So you’ve got your social content engine in place, are starting to see some real business benefits, but are wondering how you can supercharge all of this content you’ve collected to drive even more results. Enter social engagement. An effective engagement platform will amplify your social content across the web, help consumers discover new products on their social networks, connect brand advocates, and create new ones.

So what is social engagement? Simply defined, a social engagement strategy helps link the social activity of consumers on networks like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, with the social content on your site. The most common example would be the “Like” button, now ubiquitous across the web. Facebook changed the game over two years ago, making it possible, with the click of a button, to bridge the gap between a social network and outside websites. On your site, total Likes are reflected with a numerical value and on Facebook, your customers “Like” shows up in their Timeline and friends’ Tickers, with links back to the source. Innovative for the time, no doubt, but let’s remember that “Likes” don’t equal sales.

To bridge the social sales divide, we recommend a much deeper integration than just the “Like” button, centered on the content proven to drive traffic and sales, your native social content. There are 3 key “flavors” of social engagement tactics that you need to be familiar with: Discovery, Loyalty, and Community.






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The 3 Flavors of Social Engagement

1. DiscoverySocial Discovery amplifies your social content to and from social networks. Social discovery helps brands get in front of new audiences—on a massive scale—by empowering customers to advocate products to friends and connections. Examples include:

• Social Advisory Letting users connect with their social networks without ever having to leave your site. If a customer is considering a purchase but wants to run it by their Facebook friends first, providing them the option to easily connect with trusted friends and get the final validation needed to make a purchase.

• Social Subscription If a consumer is considering a purchase, but not quite ready to pull the trigger, giving them the option to follow a product (e.g. “Beats by Dre Headphones”) and reach them where they’re spending most of their time online, on Facebook. As new social content is submitted about a product, push them updates in their timeline with images, reviews, and links back to your site. Similar to the option to Follow a Product, providing the option to subscribe to a broader category (e.g. “Headphones”) is helpful to customers considering a purchase, but not yet considering any specific products.

• User Follow A tactic that we’re all too familiar in our day-to-day interaction with Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Offering follow functionality on your site helps users connect with one another and receive regular updates from the users that they find most interesting.









2. LoyaltySocial Loyalty applies proven gamification techniques to encourage customers to engage with your site, create more social content, and share more to their social networks. Examples include:

• Point Pograms Rewarding customers with points for taking meaningful actions on your site. For instance, assigning points for submitting a video, answering a question, receiving a helpful vote, or sharing something with their social network.

• Badges Encouraging customers to create and share more content by providing badges that can be seen by all, denoting their contributions on your site. Badges are generally assigned based either on points or specific actions. For example, a customer can be a “Top Answerer” for answering 50+ questions or a “Photography Pro” for submitting 20+ images.

Example of offering points both for submitting a review and for sharing with Facebook.









2. Loyalty (continued)

• Leaderboard To feel successful, users need to trust that the system works, that it’s fair, and that they’ve truly earned the points they’ve accumulated. By offering a Leaderboard, you provide a way for users to see their results, understand how the system works, and see how they rank relative to other customers.

3. CommunityCommunity tactics help connect brand advocates and prospects in the purchase cycle. Examples include:

• Comprehensive User Profiles A user profile is a way to provide more information about a customer or content contributor than just a name or alias. Profiles add authenticity to social content and serve to humanize contributors with a profile picture, personality attributes (e.g. “avid golfer” or “foodie”), and a historical summary of a user’s site and social activity. Profiles are also the tie that binds all social activity together across your site and social networks. Today, profiles commonly make use of Facebook Login, to remove barriers to login for consumers, and automatically sync information to and from Facebook.









3. Community (continued)

• Questions, Comments, and Voting Offering the ability for users to connect with each other to comment on a contribution, ask an individual a question about a particular product (not in their Facebook network), or vote social content as helpful or not.

Benefits of Social Engagement TacticsExciting stuff, right? While most engagement tactics are relatively young, that’s not to say they haven’t been proven by a handful of innovative companies already.

Take for example Step2, America’s largest manufacturer of childrens’ toys. Step2 has long been a believer in the power of social content and encouraged customer feedback for many years now. Interested in taking their social programming to the next level, Step2 decided they should take advantage of their customers’ (current and soon-to-be mothers) passion for their products, and develop a loyalty program to create deeper bonds with existing customers.

What They Did

Step2 launched a comprehensive profiling system to help customers learn more about one another through profiles complete with picture, location, historical activity on Step2, and other relevant info . They added community aspects that would help customers connect based on similar attributes (e.g. “first-time mom,” “mother of twins,” “grandparent”), and ask questions of one another or follow specific users.

Step2 also launched a loyalty program to keep a tally of users’ interactions with their site and reward the most active contributors with points and badges. Points are awarded for uploading user images and videos, writing a review, or sharing to social networks, and top contributors are recognized on Step2’s “Buzzboard” (a form of Leaderboard) showing publicly how they stack up relative to other customers’ social contributions.









Step2’s Results

As a result of their changes, Step2 saw an influx of social content being contributed and shared. Most importantly, however, was the fact that Step2 had the necessary foundation in place to track their social performance and realize that it was, in fact, driving real business benefits. With their social conent and engagement programs launched in February 2012, in just 3 months Step2 saw:

• 6X increase in user-generated images and videos11

• 135% increase in Facebook-referred traffic12

• 3X increase in revenue from Facebook-referred visitors13

To see and experience Step2’s loyalty program live, visit www.step2.com.

Do This NowStep2 is just one of many brands already successfully engaging customers, on-site and off, with social content. As demonstrated in the Step2 example, the business benefits are real, and adopting social engagement tactics into your own marketing plan can drive meaningful sales when done properly.

If you’re looking for a place to start, re-review the 3 “flavors” of engagement tactics outlined, pick the one that you feel is most appropriate for your brand, and start experimenting. Whether you’re tiptoeing in with Community or diving head first with a combination of all 3, draft a social roadmap today outlining your brand’s objectives in social and launch plan of attack. Map out the order in which you plan to roll-out social features ahead of time to have a clear view of how your social programs will work together holistically over time. As with your social content engine, a points program needs to integrate with user profile, which needs to work well with a leaderboard, which needs to integrate with user follow. I think you probably get the point by now.

By nature, social is meant to be shared and open. Having a clear vision of an integrated social experience will help you avoid missteps that can hinder progress, and start seeing social activities translating to sales that much quicker.






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STEP 3

Test, Measure, and Optimize





Step 3: Test, Measure, and Optimize

Of course you need to be able to measure the performance of social campaigns. It’s obvious, right? Wrong. It’s astonishing how few brands are actually measuring their social programs from start to finish. Sure you’ve probably got a handle on Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and potentially even how many Likes/Comments or re-tweets are generated by your company’s social updates, but do you have a handle on how these social initiatives have translated into sales?

You need to.

A well-implemented social measurement platform enables you to precisely measure the sales impact of social activity. As with anything else in your social strategy, it’s necessary to have an integrated platform where you can link social content activity (contributions and interactions) to native sales and traffic data data. A single, integrated platform means that social activity on your site is optimized to drive traffic, conversion, and revenue, and can answer critical questions about your social performance. Questions such as:

• “Which type of shared content creates the most organic traffic?”• “Which type of engagement is most likely to drive conversion?”• “Who are my brand advocates and how can I leverage their

advocacy in social?”

And most importantly...

• “Am I getting the expected ROI from my social activity?”

The insight that can be gained analyzing social content and interaction is truly limitless. With answers to any one of the above questions, you’ll have identified an actionable place to focus your energy and improve your business through social.









Do This NowPull together everything you currently know about your social performance and make a list. Hopefully you’ve got more than just Facebook and Twitter fan counts, but if that’s all you got, throw them in there too. Work with your team to see if you’re able to draw any definitive lines between a social campaign and traffic or sales. Can you do it? Where are the holes preventing you from making that link?

The following is a baseline guide for what you should be able to measure:

1. Content Volume (comments, images/videos, reviews, etc.)2. Clicks (interaction with your content on-site and on social networks)3. Social Shares (number of shares on social networks)4. Traffic (resulting from social content and the referring source)5. Conversion Rates (resulting from social content and social-referred

visitors)6. Sales (resulting from social content and social-referred visitors)

If you don’t currently have the means to measure the performance of most of the above, figure out how to start tracking immediately. You know this by now, but it’s critical that your measurement platform be integrated across all of your social programs. Having a grasp on any of the above data points isn’t nearly as valuable without an understanding of how your all of your social initiatives are working together, and where you’ve got leverage when you need to make changes. While measuring sentiment (number of positive Likes/Tweets) is an okay start, your measurement platform must be able to tell you exactly which campaigns led to which dollars, if you ever hope to achieve true social success.

Now get out there and start experimenting! Just be sure you’re also measuring, so you can show your boss (in numbers) that there actually is something to this social thing and, more importantly, that it’s finally time for that promotion because you’re one of the few that can make sense of it all.







CHECKLIST

Turn Social Into Sales





Turn Social Into Sales Checklist

For beginners, linking social to sales may seem like a daunting, if not impossible, task. I can only hope that this eBook demonstrated that creating sales through social is not only achievable, but fairly straightforward, as long as you approach it in a thoughtful and systematic way. To re-cap, let’s review in the form of a checklist including some key questions that should be considered at each stage of your progress:

Launch a Social Content Engine, Leveraging Customer Content

- Do I have the right mix of social content on my site?- Do I make it easy for customers to contribute high-quality content?- Is my content coverage enough to prevent customers from looking elsewhere?

Broadcast Social Content to Boost Engagement, On-Site and Off

- Do I make it easy for customers to share content to their social networks?- Do my customer have a way to connect with one another on my site?- Do I reward my customers for engagement and positive contributions?- Do my social programs integrate with and compliment one another?

Test, Measure, and Optimize

- Do I have a measurement platform today that can link any of my social programs to actual traffic and sales?- Do I know how on-site activity impacts activity on social networks and vice versa?- Am I seeing expected ROI on my social investments?- Do I know which programs I should invest in, or cut, if I had to tomorrow?

There’s no time like the present to bridge the gap between social and sales. Whether you’re a social media vet or newbie just learning the ropes, if you follow the steps in this eBook, you’ll have the foundation built to realize true social success and be well-equipped to adapt right along with social innovations for years to come.

Until next time... stay social, my friends.









How To Turn Social Into Sales Today. PowerReviews’ Essential Social Suite is only complete solution to integrate the 3 key components of social success—social content, social engagement, and social measurement—in one complete package.

The Social Content Engine generates the most valuable product-related social content, proven to drive higher conversion and improve SEO.

The Social Engagement layer helps amplify social content across the web, increase loyalty, and drive traffic to your site through established gamification techniques.

Social Measurement helps measure and optimize the impact of social activity on sales through the first integrated social measurement platform.

For more info on how The Essential Social Suite can work for your brand, or review your social strategy with a PowerReviews social commerce expert, contact us today:






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About PowerReviews

PowerReviews is the world’s largest social commerce network. It helps companies tap into consumer conversations to drive better business, while providing consumers an easy way to share their insights about brands, products and services. Leading brands have standardized on PowerReviews to drive sales, increase traffic and shape product development.

PowerReviews has helped more than 5,500 of the world’s best brands turn social into sales. On average, our customers see:

• 3X More Content• 50% More Traffic• 10% Higher Conversion

To speak with a PowerReviews representative and learn more about how our complete social solution can help your business, click here to contact us >

Blake BryshaBlake is Sr. Marketing Manager at PowerReviews, focused on social strategy and emerging media. He’s worked in social technology for more than 5 years, and has nearly 10 years e-commerce experience. Blake’s work has been published in numerous industry publications including Internet Retailer, ClickZ, AdAge, TechCrunch, and The New York Times. He currently resides in New York City.

Additional Contributors: Jessica Falarski & Dave Hawley

About the Author






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Appendix





Appendix

1. Social Media Report: Spending Time, Money and Going Mobile (Neilsen)

2. Facebook Infographic (gopopcorn.ca)

3. Booz & Company 2010 Data

4. Edelman Data

5. The 2011 Social Shopping Study (the e-tailing group)

6. The Zero Moment of Truth (Google)

7. The 2011 Social Shopping Study (the e-tailing group)

8. PowerReviews Data

9. Habits and Motivations of Consumers (eConsultancy)

10. PowerReviews Data

11, 12, 13. Step2 Social Loyalty Case Study (PowerReviews Data)






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