Social Media Marketing

The holiday shopping season happens inevitably every year, drawing the public into the appeal of the top retail brands within the United States. Evaluating the internet marketing efforts and budgets of these brands proves to be quite revealing. Stores are always altering their budgets, offerings and other aspects of their establishments, which plays a significant factor in their performance overall and their standings as the cream of the crop in retail. With the holiday shopping season upon us, retailers are also going to begin shifting their budgets to correspond to the change in the outlandish, sale-fueled shopping habits of consumers.

Facebook is taking the next step into e-commerce with its “Collections” feature. The idea is this: brands you “like” on Facebook will post their products in your news feed, giving you the option to “want” or “collect.” Based on which verb you click on, that product will be shared by you in one of several ways. Based on what you’ve read or heard about Facebook Collections so far, what’s your initial impression?

Facebook beats out Pinterest and Twitter for driving the most traffic to retail sites. Facebook makes up for a staggering 86 percent of retail traffic, while Pinterest drives 12 percent and Twitter 3 percent, according to an infographic by e-commerce consultant RichRelevance. To be fair, Facebook has the most users of the three. Still, it's interesting to see Facebook driving so much retail traffic given recent doubts about whether it's useful for retailers.

The facts: More than 11 million Pinterest users have driven more online revenue per click than 900 million Facebook users and 140 million Twitter users combined. What's more impressive is that this visual sharing pinboard social network achieved these numbers in roughly a year.

Despite rumblings that social media is losing its value and cache as a marketing tool (or commerce or customer service tool) for retailers — let the debate rage on — there are plenty of brands that are investing their time and money in the channel. The common refrain that you hear from all of them is that they seek better engagement with their customers and prospects, and social media can play a significant role in helping them accomplish that. In that vein, Retail Online Integration has compiled its second annual ranking of the top 50 fastest-growing Facebook retailers — with a twist this year.

When it comes to Pinterest, the million dollar (billion dollar?) question remains: How is the company going to make money? Fast Company's October issue has a great profile on the company and CEO Ben Silbermann that explores a couple different possibilites. Like The Fancy, Pinterest could try to make a commission off products purchased via the site or, like Polyvore, it could ramp up advertising.

Maybe it's the gargantuan boxes or pallets stacked to the ceiling, but Instagrammers love taking photos at Costco. Over at Wal-Mart, shoppers prefer Twitter, and Safeway shoppers check in with Yelp. All of these behaviors go by the same name — social media moments, according to LocalResponse, a mobile advertising provider. The company released its first study of retail check-ins from more than 136,500 social media moments at 10 top U.S. retailers, using four social networks — foursquare, Twitter, Yelp and Instagram — over the summer.

As merchants sift through their back-to-school receipts, it looks like the season's two best-sellers were social and mobile sales. IBM's Benchmark reports that social sales, or online sales that happen as a result of a referral from a social media site, accounted for 1.6% of July sales, a jump of 25% from the prior year, and 2.2% of all August sales, a 69.7% increase. M-commerce increased by 15.7% in July, and 15.4% in August. Overall, online sales gained 11% in July, then slowed to a 3.9% advance in August.

Empathica's Consumer Insights Panel surveyed more than 6,500 U.S. consumers. The findings show that mobile and social customer experience strategies are becoming more important than ever for brands, with retail and restaurant consumers using these channels to make decisions - even while in-store.

Walmart may have beaten mom & pop stores in many ways long ago, but when it comes to Facebook fan love, local businesses are beating the giant retailer handily, according to a new study by social-media metrics firm Recommend.ly. Nearly a year into Walmart's ambitious My Local Walmart program to establish individual Facebook fan pages for its 3,500-plus stores, the pages on average lag those of local businesses in fan counts, update activity and frequency of conversations, according to the study.