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Social commerce’s biggest impact is providing unique buying propositions for customers and new touch points for companies.

Group buying and group gifting social platforms conveniently bring together family and friends to contribute to a gift for a specified recipient. Facebook apps like gifting on birthdays and eDivvy.com provide simple platforms for users to set up group gifting and handle the logistics of collecting money, sending reminders, and sending the gift.

Social shopping

A unique buying proposition that is particularly relevant for fashion related products. eMarketer.com showed that 81 percent of teenage girls use their friends and peers as a source of trend information and 45 percent seek the opinions of those same groups when purchasing clothing or footwear.

Virtual Runways

Wet Seal developed a virtual runway where site visitors put together outfits to share with their friends or to present to the community to be voted on. A pair of friends shopping at Wet Seal can use a service powered by Sesh.com to view the same product pages, chat in real time, and use a drawing tool to notate or highlight products they are considering.

Groups for Events

Social commerce facilitates conversion in other areas. For example, many  music fans would be more likely to attend an event if they knew their friends would accompany them, and if the process of inviting friends and buying tickets jointly were more seamless.  Eventbrite allows for just that sort of group planning through Twitter and Facebook, although it doesn’t yet allow for sales directly through social media sites, but that may change.

Developments like group gifting, social shopping, and ticket buying provide a small glimpse of the potential ROIs on social media.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last decade, you’ve probably seen the reach of social media increase at light speed. Consumers and brands are voluntarily sharing knowledge and data to better understand each other through blogs and social media.

While some of the content and information generated through the internet are millions of cat videos, customers and brands are also sharing who they are and what they are planning to doing. Naturally, some of the generated content are their thoughts on products, or their desire to buy something. As this type of information increases consumers are more likely to refer to their social networks for more information on the product they intend to buy rather than searching for a product through search.

Search engines recognized that a long time ago, and most of them have already incorporated ‘personal’ into their platforms. Even when searching for a product with intent, it is extremely difficult to not be influenced by your social network.For example, Google gives higher rankings to results that have been shared within your network and Bing displays ‘social links’ when you do a search.

And of course, consumers are going to trust their social networks more than anything else; because their networks consist of the people they trust the most—friends and family. Social selling is the new word-of-mouth marketing.

Because you cannot afford not to. Consumers are spending more and more time on social media, and inadvertently some of the things they share are related to the products they like and what they are going to buy. This is a great place to engage new customers because the new customers are connected to people they trust and know.

The ability to engage potential customers through their connections give brands new marketing opportunities that are not available through traditional online advertising methods like ad banners or Search Engine optimization (SEO).   A study published by Booz and Co, lists some of the new opportunities that are added into the marketing funnel by social selling.

As social networking sites gain prominence as a new type of commerce, it is becoming extremely important for marketers and companies to develop an understanding of and start practicing ways to tap into that funnel. It’s critical for brands to jump in now even if they don’t have much expertise; because social commerce is evolving at a blistering rate. They must be willing to learn the process while they are doing it, or risk getting left behind.