What do buy buttons mean for B2B social media?

The website has always had a pull for online commerce; last year, Social Media Today called Pinterest a ‘sales conversion powerhouse’, revealing a 50% higher conversion rate than its rivals. Fellow social media platforms Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have all moved towards ecommerce by planning to including purchasing features of their own.

This is great news for social media addicts like myself, because we’re getting closer to never having to leave them.

We can’t multitask on a mobile device like we can on a desktop yet, so for the standard mobile user, tapping an advert can mean being dragged out of your app, and what you were doing, into another screen.

As a mobile social media user myself, I can tell you that we hate that. It breaks the ‘flow’ of the experience, and makes even the idea of clicking an advert seem cumbersome. Any social media platform that brings more features in-house is bound to find success with them.

Of course, it won’t work without content. To be successful, companies on any of these platforms will need to provide us with quality content. Only time will tell, but hopefully more ways to advertise will mean adverts of greater interest in our timelines.

And oh, the analytics. New advertising numbers will be available on which demographics buy what where when and how, who’s most likely to download your app or buy your product from which platform, et cetera et cetera. All these numbers make invaluable contributions to successful targeted PR, marketing and social media campaigns.

The inclusion of more and more features into social media applications is exciting to me. It open up a vast range of possibilities for creative campaigns, including new opportunities for B2B social media relationships.