Last week Proctor & Gamble began selling Pampers diapers and wipes - along with an assortment of other products such as Tide, Oral B, Olay and Pantene - through its Pampers Facebook page. P&G has sold its products before via Facebook, namely its pre-sale of Pampers Cruisers with Dry Max; this initiative, though, it rolled out using Amazon's revamped webstore e-commerce platform to power the Facebook page.
P&G plans on expanding this offering to other products in the coming months, it says.
A Fine Line
Social commerce has proven to be surprisingly difficult for many companies, which tend to emphasize the "commerce" part of the equation and leave the "social" as an afterthought. Few companies have approached it with the same finesse as P&G, one of the first to use Amazon's new platform on Facebook and one of a handful to sell directly through Facebook. Another example is J Crew, which just launched an ad campaign in which it featured not only its own products but goods from competing stores that J Crew thought its customers would like, reports the New York Times.
It is getting a piece of the sale - but won't be earning as much of a margin if the sale had been one of its own products.
As more firms try out these technologies, they need to tread a fine line between the consumers' expectations of a social community and companies' expectations of what it takes to make a sale. Essentially companies have to remember that "this is a conversation, not a one-night stand," says Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president for emerging media and brand strategy at 360i (via the New York Times.) "If you're in this community, make sure you're contributing to the maintenance of that community."
Tips to remember:
Social buyers have different expectations. Users will demand the same level of engagement when they buy on Facebook. Companies need to be prepared to answer questions immediately, and in a customized manner - no boilerplate responses are acceptable in this channel.
Overt sales pitches or pressure is out. A Facebook page that the user navigates to to make purchases? Fine. Exhortations, or worse, sneak attempts to get the consumer to buy products while she is looking at other content on your site? A definite no-no.
Friends' recommendations only carry so much weight. New statistics from WSL Strategic Retail provided to the New York Times show, though, that social networks will only goose sales so far - and that online recommendation sites in fact carry more weight. According to new data from the firm's online survey of nearly 2,000 men and women, more online shoppers turn to review sites for information about products than turn to their online social networks. While 95% of online shoppers agree that what they learned online helped them decide what to buy, only 13% go to their Facebook friends or Twitter to find out about a product before they buy. By contrast, 25% of online shoppers go to Internet review sites.
