Introducing Inside Social Commerce

Inside Network has a new blog in its lineup of industry-facing publications. We’re pleased to introduce Inside Social Commerce, our site tracking the convergence of social media and e-commerce. As our readers know, Inside Network -- home of AppData, PageData and Inside Network Research -- is dedicated to mapping the intersections between social media and various verticals. Our existing blogs Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps have all faithfully covered the branching ecosystems of social, game and mobile applications. Inside Social Commerce adds to the diagram by examining apps and pages that drive e-commerce on a variety of platforms. The concept of social commerce is hardly new; advertisers and product marketers have long understood the need to generate social activity around a product to create purchase intent and enduring appeal. With the rise of Facebook and smartphone applications, marketing and sales practices have evolved significantly beyond direct mailing campaigns and jingles in TV commercials. Now we have consumer product companies building and launching apps to drive audience engagement, micro-social networks emerging around specific demographics of consumer and increasing marketing dollars being dedicated to Facebook campaigns and promotions within social and mobile games. New ad networks have sprung up on Facebook, mobile and the open web to direct the eyeballs and clicks of the most engaged audiences to online storefronts. We even see Facebook itself becoming one of those online storefronts with Gifts and the new Collections feature for retailers. The point of it all is to make someone somewhere buy something, to guide a user from the point of interaction with social media (e.g. pinning a picture of a baby covered in lipstick to their Pinterest board) to the point of sale (buying lipstick from a cosmetics website). The goal of Inside Social Commerce is to document this emerging area and all of the techniques various product sellers, social networks, ad networks and third-party service providers use to make the process better, faster or at least more interesting. Using our PageData and AppData tools, we can identify and document the various pages and apps that are successful in attracting audiences and potentially converting them to paying customers. By following relevant news and analyzing the trends of the major players in the social commerce space, we can characterize the rapidly growing field and predict where investors and marketers are most likely to spend their money. Our goal is to keep our readers up to speed on social commerce and help them understand how it can improve their own businesses. Whether you’re selling something or not, we invite you to check out Inside Social Commerce here where you’ll already find a number of articles tracking current events in social commerce -- like ShopIgniter’s new engagement and promotion platform, Amazon’s credit lending to Amazon.com retailers or Yellowdog Media’s expansions beyond its Yardsellr app. Our blog is currently headed up by Damon Brown, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook Marketing among other social media publications. Be sure to follow both him and the blog on Twitter and Like the Inside Social Commerce page on Facebook. You can expect great things in the months to come.

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Introducing Inside Social Commerce

AJ Glasser

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AJ Glasser