Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has stated that social ecommerce is the next area to explode and experience high levels of growth. The explosion has already begun though.
Back in March 2010 Pampers Facebook store was experiencing 1000 transactions per hour, Gap launched a $50 voucher for $25 and it had 441,000 buyers. With 800 million users worldwide on Facebook 200 million on Twitter the potential for social ecommerce is potentially huge.
Research has suggested that 90% of people will take notice of what friends suggest via a social networking platform above any other form of advertising. Many retailers are already gearing themselves to target this area of ecommerce that has remain largely untapped, they believe that with the explosion of smart phones and social networking apps people will welcome social ecommerce like they have taken to social networking.
Twitter is having a big effect on advertising. For instance, in the ad breaks for TV shows such as X-Factor Twitter is finding a huge spike in activity. Again, the correlation becomes obvious for the potential of retailers pushing offers at this time and users to suggest these to other friends. Back in Twitters infancy Dell turned over $1m in revenue from simply pushing sales alerts, fast forward to today regarding the explosion of 'trends' on Twitter and the scope for pushing sales alerts combined with the traffic it receives at specific times during the day makes it obvious that there is the potential for increased revenue.
