Student Number
Topic: Social Media and Ecommerce – An Evaluation of Two Merging Paradigms
Concept 1: Social Media
Communication is an important factor for building relationships into the community, whether it is real or virtual. Social media is an appropriate term that fits into the concept of social communication. It is a sort of platform on website and applications which are created so that people could share content as well as communicate with each other efficiently (Hudson, 2019). Thus, social media has been possessed by almost every sector of society. Approximately 65 percent Americans uses social media platform since pew research conducted in the year 2019 for purposes including work, politics, communication patters, information sharing, news, communities, and stress releasing (Perrin, 2015). However, one of the important uses of social media could be seen in marketing businesses. As per research studies, 88 percent of marketers use such platforms for social media advertising with $60 billion annual expenditures (Whiting & Williams, 2013).
Concept 2: Ecommerce
E-commerce is an electronic commerce and works as a business that manages collection and payment for goods and services through the internet platform (Díaz, n.d.). Hence, online shopping platforms are considered e-commerce platforms because they sell services through internet-based websites. There are several new things which are implemented on e-commerce websites so that customer interaction could be built for communication purposes. For example, websites including Amazon, eBay, and JD offers in-page product description and user-generated content such as customer reviews as well as customer FAQ (Zhou et al., 2017). Hence, the use of e-commerce with different integrations has become a quiet constructive part of building a consumer base. Therefore, it is mandatory to assess different integrations that could be helpful to identify consumer needs on e-commerce websites effectively.
Concept 3: Social Media and Ecommerce Integration
The integrated concept of social media and e-commerce are collectively termed as social commerce. It is different from traditional websites because of user recommendations, referrals, social shopping tools, and online community developments (Linda, 2010). Additionally, social media and e-commerce integration could offer several important advantages to the organization. For example, if social media presence is present on e-commerce platforms, then promotions for services becomes very simple and effective (Valerio, Lecoq & Noémier, 2019). Further, customer’s purchase decisions get influenced after they watch other people’s reviews for a certain product or service.
One more advantage of the social media platform on e-commerce is the rapid development of trust among consumers. In online product or service exchange for business to consumer relationships, risks are associated with transaction processing, but reviews and recommendations from social media platforms reduce these possibilities immediately (Valerio, Lecoq & Noémier, 2019). Thus, social media impacts consumer purchase decisions after they go through reviews online. Besides, the chat box is implemented on such e-commerce platforms for constant communication among customers. Hence, marketing becomes rapid and offers product propagation among other consumers. Facebook is also considered one of the social commerce platforms as it offers to buy and to sell products or services through a business version of the app. Another important term that comes from the integration of social media and e-commerce is word of mouth advertising. It can be defined as information communication of product usage by other consumers to promote it very often by means of the social platform (Yan et al., 2016).