selling with social how social curation drives engagement and...

How rich social content and customer feedback combine to drive engagement, trust, and conversion

How social curation drives engagement and sales

SELLING WITH SOCIAL

1 Social meets financial: How customer conversations drive acquisition, retention, and innovation1 Selling with social: How social curation drives engagement and sales

100 years ago the process of buying something was intimately social. Customers would walk into a store and make contact with another human – in many cases someone they already knew from their local community. Often the employee helping the customer was personally involved in creating the products or at least selecting and sourcing them from a merchant or manufacturer. By understanding both the customer’s needs and the product, the employee was able to make the shopping experience easy, personal and relevant.

Today, much of this interaction has disappeared as many of our purchasing experiences take place between a human and a computer. By default, ecommerce is not social. Click. Add to cart. Click. Confirm purchase. Product delivered to your door a day or two later. While intentionally convenient, the lack of human interaction in the experience often causes complication. Did the photo and description accurately represent the product? Is the product truly the right fit for the need?

So how can brands inject human connection back into the modern shopping experience? How can we connect the voices of merchants and shoppers—enabling shoppers, brands, and retailers to hear each other and to be heard?

The answer comes in the form of social media content, whose rapid rise provides the opportunity to make shopping even more “human” than it’s ever been. The proliferation of social channels and the sheer volume of conversations happening online have put brands in a prime position to forge meaningful connections from brand to retailer to shopper across the globe.

The age of truly connected commerce is now.

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At Bazaarvoice, we believe that human connection should be at the heart of all interactions between people and businesses—especially in the age of online shopping.

Human connection is the foundation for trust—enabling authentic interactions that lead to brand loyalty and better shopping experiences—and we believe that shopping online should be just as social as if it were happening in-store.

Shoppers are inherently social. We love to talk about what we buy, and when we do, other people also buy. When we love a product, we almost can’t help bring it up in casual conversation. Ratings and reviews were the first step in bringing this authentic dialog between consumers and brands online. Still, reviews comprise only a small percentage of the conversations about brands and

products. Social channels like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have empowered more people to participate in the conversation, and they’re talking about your brand at soaring rates.

Today, nearly 75% of all Internet users are active on social channels1 — sharing opinions, ideas, thoughts, and pieces of their lives via social networks. We’re seeing more participation than ever before—with hundreds of thousands of brands and products mentioned every minute—and with that we’re seeing a migration from longer-form communication vehicles to more bite-sized social sharing.

The voice of the customer has never been stronger, and we believe that the intersection of authentic customer reviews and emotive social posts and media is the future of truly social commerce online. In this paper we’ll explore the evolution of social commerce and offer guidelines to help your brand harness a wider spectrum of conversations—delivering a better shopping experience for customers and more engagement and sales for your brand.

2 Selling with social: How social curation drives engagement and sales

The evolution of product feedback

The state of social2

The evolution of social commerce


Facebook1 billion active users

2.5 billion pieces of content shared each day

Instagram200 million active users

60 million photos a dayTwitter560 million active users

5,700 tweets every second

Compare this to the publishing industry, which was dominated by a similar broadcast model until 2004, when blogging went mainstream. Blogs gave the average person the ability to share their opinions with a broader audience for the first time. Compared with the status quo of one-way broadcast newspapers and magazines, the blog was considered “social” publishing. Blogs enabled everyday people from around the world to easily share and connect in ways that were not possible before. But while blogs were a major step forward, the majority of people did not participate–they may have read blog posts, but most people were not regularly writing them.

In the beginning, most information about products came from in-depth reports published by authorities like Consumer Reports. This was a one-way broadcast model. A small number of “experts” wrote the reviews, which were consumed by millions of purchasers. The average person was unable to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way.

In 2005, ratings and reviews were introduced, enabling a much wider net of consumers to share their experiences. Reviews — solicited responses from consumers — proved to be incredibly effective at driving purchase decisions. Similar to blogs, reviews make it possible for everyday people to share their experiences, provide in-depth feedback on products and brands, and offer advice to shoppers. While most customers had opinions and shared them with their friends, the fact is that—just as with blogs—only the most dedicated, passionate consumers were actually contributing reviews.

Social media brought about the next major shift. Today, the majority of people do contribute—sharing opinions, ideas, thoughts, and pieces of their lives via social networks like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

The intersection of customer reviews and social


Without reading any of the words on the page, you can see the difference right away. From a purely visual standpoint, the social-enhanced product page feels more engaging. This new type of product-related content is a perfect compliment to ratings and reviews. It’s often less technical and more emotive. Less specific and more whimsical. And a lot of it is visual–showing off a new look, or showing a product in the context of real life.

Most people share their experiences in a casual, unprompted way—typically in conversation with friends—and traditionally offline: during a meal, happy hour, round of golf, or family gathering. These conversations are generally not as in-depth as what you would read in a review or blog post, but this word-of-mouth sharing is a powerful force for purchase consideration.

Today, many of these casual conversations are taking place over social media. This means that billions of these conversations that used to happen exclusively offline are now open and available to the public through social networks. Social posts offer an opportunity to capture the voices of customers and engage shoppers like never before. The combination of reviews and rich social content offers a more complete shopping experience—engaging both sides of the brain and providing a more comprehensive view of a product for future shoppers.

As consumer preference is increasingly shifting towards media-centric web experiences, it’s imperative that brands address this preference on their own sites. Many product mentions in social have photos and other media—which tend to be more emotional, conversational, and spontaneous. The contrast between a page with customer-contributed social content and one without it is clear to see:

Reviews tend to be more detailed, technical, or specific — like the left brain.

Social content connects more with your emotions and your heart — like the right brain.

*Results from a client using Bazaarvoice Curations

This all comes together to provide a better way for brands and retailers to understand and engage with their markets. It enables them to partner with brand advocates to tell compelling stories. And it empowers consumers to have their voices heard and live better lives through informed purchasing decisions.

Comparison of a Clinique product page without social content versus one with social integration

Results: Social content in the purchase path*Integrating visual content from social networks onto product pages provides the authentic social proof that real people are using and enjoying your products. In a pure A/B test—measuring product pages with and without social images—we found:

3-6%Conversion Lift

25-40%Engagement Increase


Automated filters are the first step in social curation, and they can be extremely effective in weeding out less desirable posts and updates. For example, it’s fairly straightforward for automated filters to flag posts that contain profanity, negative sentiment (e.g., updates containing words like “bad,” “terrible,” or “no good”), competitor references, or comments that are irrelevant to your brand or messaging.

At Bazaarvoice, we’ve found that automated filters must be augmented with human moderation to maximize the value and quality of social content. To understand why, consider the challenges that United Bank of Switzerland faces when looking to integrate social media content into its website.

While automated filters are the first step, the human touch is often the only way to ensure that only the most meaningful, relevant content is published to your on-site social media experience. This is especially true when working with images, where the nuanced difference between appropriate and inappropriate can be difficult to detect with automated filtering.

Furthermore—for those who seek to maximize the value of social content for ecommerce—it can be difficult to link social posts to a specific product SKU or category. Connecting the dots with accuracy between a post on a social network and a related product is a job best suited for human matching. And this step of product matching is critical in generating ROI from social content. Whether it’s an image, video, or text-based update, precise social-to-product-catalog matching is necessary to harness the full power on on-site social, enabling social posts to be shown at the point of purchase and connecting the dots between social galleries and product pages—ultimately refining the overwhelming volume of social noise into social content that drives conversion.

Separating signal from noise in social

The wealth of brand-relevant nuggets in social are often buried under a pile of garbage. With billions of daily updates, it’s increasingly challenging to separate signal from noise in social.

How can brands distinguish the meaningful conversations about their products and services from irrelevant conversations that don’t add value to the ecommerce experience?

United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) is a global banking and financial services group, offering investment advice and access to the world’s capital markets. “UBS” is also an acronym for a Bible society, and could easily be mistyped as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) or USB (Universal Serial Bus). A search for UBS (or any of these common misspellings) across social will yield a mountain of unrelated results.

Powerful filters go a long way e.g., combining a search for “UBS” with other relevant words—“bank,” “finance,” “Swiss”), but it takes the final touch of human moderation to ensure that any content reaching UBS’s site is truly the most meaningful and relevant social content available.


3 steps to drive engagement with social content

1

Determine preferred social sources and gather content: Figure out which social networks are most complimentary to your goals, acknowledging that each social platform has different sets of strengths and weaknesses (e.g., Twitter excels at real-time content, while Facebook is better for sharing and commenting). Review current conversations about your brand in order to find the right sources and media mix based on hashtags, keywords, or other search criteria that match your objectives. Identifying your preferred content sources and sources for a regular stream of product content is the start to any successful social curation program.

2

Develop moderation guidelines complete with filtering, human moderation, and tagging: While you’ll need to reach critical mass of social content in order to offer a truly compelling experience, “the more content the better” is rarely the best approach. As discussed in the previous section, a successful moderation program should be three-tiered:

Automated Filters: Develop a filtering system to circumvent undesirable content automatically. Whether it’s photos to fill a gallery, or specific keywords and hashtags from certain locations, your filters should sift through the content streams to find the content most relevant for your audience.

Human Moderation: Beyond the automated filtering, a team of trained moderators should review every piece of content based on your moderation guidelines. This will ensure that any content coming through is up to par, and give you peace of mind that no problematic content will slip through the cracks.

Product Matching: Finally, a tagging system should be in place to match social posts to the individual product or category referenced. This is critical—enabling you to surface product-specific content in the most appropriate places throughout your ecommerce experience and maximize the value of on-site social media.

The right blend of reviews and social content can be hugely beneficial to your brand, but how can you get started? We’ve outlined a few steps and considerations to help guide the planning of your social curation campaign:

3

Put your social content to work onsite: Showing curated photo, video, and social posts of people enjoying your product onsite is a powerful way to increase engagement and conversation. As the counterpart to ratings and reviews, social curation enables the display of “social proof” (for instance, people playing the latest video game, rather than game reviews). A few things to think about when determining how your social content is implemented:

Define measurable objectives: Is your goal to increase engagement, time on site, or conversion as a result of on-site social? The answer is, of course, all of the above, and having a system in place to measure the performance of your program is critical to optimizing over time. While some results are more difficult to measure—like on-site research leading to in-store purchase—it’s important to note that these fringe benefits can very well be the product of an engaging social research experience.

Determine traffic sources: Whether it’s paid search, SEO, or social-driven, how will you get people to the pages housing your social content in order to spur engagement and drive results?

Integrate social content on-site: Product page galleries are the place to start—showcasing social updates related to an individual product directly where people are researching the product—though the options available for on-site social integrations are endless.

In addition to product and category pages, curating campaign-related social

content for display in a branded destination gives you more

influence over the experience of photo contests, promoted

hashtags, and other social marketing campaigns.


Sources1. “New Social Media Statistics You Need to Know.” Social Media Today. February 2014.

http://socialmediatoday.com/monica-romeri/2181461/new-social-media-statistics-you-need-know

2. “Social Media Comparison Infographic.” Leverage New Age Media. April 2014.

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2014/01/social-media-networks.png

3. “Instagram News.” Instagram. April 2014. http://blog.instagram.com/post/80721172292/200m

Unless otherwise specified, stats in this paper refer to US consumers.

© Bazaarvoice, 2014

ConclusionAs brands, we must strive to make the ecommerce experience as social as it would be shopping in-store. The intersection of reviews and social expressions is a game-changer for ecommerce, but this progression does not mean that social is replacing reviews. Blogs did not go away when Twitter launched—they are thriving today more than ever. Like blogs, reviews provide a place for more committed, dedicated contributors to share in-depth ideas and feedback. Social posts have less depth than reviews, but they are often more emotive and more visual—connecting with people in a different way.

At Bazaarvoice, we believe that combining authentic reviews with emotive, unsolicited social expressions is the future of social commerce. In doing so, brands have the opportunity to paint a complete picture of a product and ensure that they’re delivering on what matters to a consumer’s unique shopping preferences. When customers are engaged, they’re more satisfied and inclined to purchase—driving sales and ultimately producing a new class of brand advocates.


About BazaarvoiceBazaarvoice is a network that connects brands and retailers to the authentic voices of people where they shop. Each month, more than 400 million people view and share authentic opinions, questions, and experiences about 70 million products in the Bazaarvoice network. The company’s technology platform amplifies these voices into the places that influence purchase decisions. Network analytics help marketers and advertisers provide more engaging experiences that drive brand awareness, consideration, sales, and loyalty. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Bazaarvoice has offices across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

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