Forrester Says Facebook Commerce Won’t Take Off. While Facebook provides a highly effective advertising platform, commerce on the social network might not take off, according to a report by Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research. She wrote that email has better customer acquisition rates than social networking; Facebook averages a one percent clickthrough and two percent conversion rate, while email marketing has an 11 percent clickthrough and a four percent conversion rate on average. Some of the highlights that she notes in her blog are: There are retailers (albeit small ones) seeing a double-digit percent of their sales coming through their Facebook stores.
These companies often have unique demographics or marketing models (e.g., flash sales) that drive this behavior.Facebook’s “data layer” is probably one of the most underleveraged assets that exists with respect to F-commerce. We wonder whether pooh-poohing about Facebook commerce ever taking off is simply an attention-getting angle. Facebook Places, Foursquare: Social Media's Tiny 2% Impact on Businesses. "You've got your Groupon and Living Social, and your Foursquare and Facebook Places," says Jonathan Marek. "What our clients are struggling with is: How big a deal are social media and location-based services, and how much of it is just sound and fury?
" That's the question on the mind of most every marketer and retailer--and Marek might finally have an answer. Marek is senior VP at at Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), a software company that provides data and analytics to some of the biggest retailers and restaurants in the world, including Starbucks, Staples, Subway, and more. As he explains, APT essentially runs "clinical drug trials for businesses," measuring the incremental impact on sales of everything from traditional ad and social media campaigns to storefront physical remodeling and relocation.
Like an FDA trial, the company uses "test and control patients," and a proprietary algorithm to measure campaigns against stores with similar traffic, sales, and characteristics. CHART OF THE DAY: Facebook Has Little Effect On What You Buy Online. Facebook Ramps Up Big E-Commerce Drive (Olga Kharif/Business Week) At this moment, the must-read stories in technology are scattered across hundreds of news sites and blogs. That's far too much for any reader to follow. Fortunately, Techmeme arranges all of these links into a single, easy-to-scan page.
Our goal is to become your tech news site of record. Story selection is accomplished via computer algorithm extended with direct human editorial input. Our human editors are: Lidija Davis, Mahendra Palsule, Andre Garrigo, David Connell, Jarrod Cugley, and occasionally Omer Horvitz and Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera.
ePayments Week: McAfee worries about mobile security. Altimeter Report: Social Commerce, How Brands Are Generating Revenue by @lcecere. I’m frequently asked “What’s the top challenge the corporate social strategist is struggling” and over and over, ROI comes up very high. To tackle this challenge head on, Altimeter has conducted a research project to find out how companies are connecting social technologies to the overall buying process as well as analyzing how they increase revenues for brands.
In conjunction with our recent conference on Social Commerce, we’ve now published the findings from interviewing top social commerce vendors and brands that are connecting commerce with social media. Our lead researcher analyst on this project is Lora Cecere who stems from Gartner and AMR and stems from Supply Chain Management, her and I will be doing a no-cost webinar to discuss these findings, I hope you join us. This report is intended for you to use, share, and spread, under creative commons, feel free to embed it on your own blog, comment on it, and discuss.
I look forward to hearing your feedback. Related Links: Cyber Monday Is Dead, Long Live Online Shopping All Thanksgiving Weekend - The eMarketer Blog.