Social Commerce Case Study

Social Commerce

The psychology of social commerce is widely written about and psychologists have spoken of six psychological segments that play a part in the process of social shopping and harness the Framing Effect. These being: social proof, scarcity, affinity, consistency, reciprocity and authority. A primary case study that illustrates the rule of reciprocity involves my own mini-business that I set up a few years ago selling my artwork through Etsy (an online shop). First promoting my artwork on Instagram, it is fair to say that it was onerous to get my work noticed amongst the hundreds of thousands of other aspiring artists. The appealing aspect of Instagram was that it allowed people to solely publish visual posts and I recognised that

Psychologist, Zajonc (1968) carried out an experiment in which he showed Chinese characters to non-Chinese speaking participants. Showing each character 1-25 times, he asked the subjects to guess the meanings of the characters; what he found was that with repeated exposure to the characters the participants developed a familiarity, and thus a fondness, for them. A real-life case study illustrating this effect was Nike’s “Find Your Greatness” campaign for the 2012 Olympics. In the hundreds of diverse billboards that were up around the UK at the time, Nike consistently featured a Twitter hashtag (#findgreatness) to ignite a conversation about the upcoming Olympic event. With repeated exposure to the social media reference, Nike received nearly double the tweets compared to its rival, Adidas (16,000 to 9,000) and received an 11% growth in Twitter followers. [17] More importantly, the campaign caused sales to skyrocket: it is reported on the official Nike website [18] that fourth quarter revenues rose 12% to $6.5 million, which was Nike’s largest ever revenue

With more and more businesses harnessing social media to promote their product or service it is becoming increasingly harder to get seen and to thrive amongst all the competition. Consequently, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have introduced paid advertising for small businesses. Facebook, in particular, allows you to choose the type of audience that you want your posts to reach by specifying certain factors such as location, age and interests. At a Techpreneur event held in Kensington, Olympia, a guest speaker (CEO of a million pound company) said that a successful business can be started “with just you and your laptop,” emphasising the prodigious influence that the internet can have on a business; he also spoke of the advantages of paid advertising. A primary case study illustrating the effects of paid promotion involves the start-up mobile application company, Your Reaction Though YRT who have just recently launched their social media application for both Apple and Android platforms and are now marketing the app on social media sites to generate downloads. It is to be noted that procuring sales at the launch of a new app is improbable as it requires a substantial number of downloads to be made first. The CEO has therefore chosen to pay the fees for paid advertising on Facebook to establish his brand internationally. Additionally, with the use