Update: Latest stats – March 2021
It’s always worth re-visiting your strategies at regular intervals. Updates to changes in consumer buying habits are being monitored. Hubspot published a report to buying habits through social media in March 2021. A relatively small sample 467 consumers was asked whether they actually bought through social media, and if so, which channels, so that this could be benchmarked against their purchases on e-commerce sites. Of the sample, over 50% had bought a product directly through a social media platform.
Only 40% of consumers limited themselves to buying from an e-commerce site only, 36% responded that they had used Facebook, 24.5% Instagram, 13.5% WhatsApp, 10% Pinterest.
Through Facebook the current tools are Facebook shops, for a large and broad reach, messenger and integration with WhatsApp and Instagram. You can link specific ads to Facebook shops listings for a fast-buy consumer experience.
With Instagram the options are shops, shoppable posts and Instagram stories. You can gain traffic through the Instagram shopping tab.
The WhatsApp shopping experience is more related to a messaging service with a business catalogue and payment facility in the message chat
The question now for an ethical brand through these channels might now simple be: do the Facebook-owned channels clash or align with my brand’s values and ethics?
Interestingly, Pinterest’s strategy seems to have been the flip of Facebook’s. Buyable pins were removed in favour of Product Pins which drive traffic to the brand’s website via an in-app browser which takes them to the website to check out, an equally fast consumer buying experience. With Pinterest’s role as a search engine and place for users to find and collect inspiration, and to ‘save’ inspiration of products they want to buy, this might sit very comfortably with you if you are an ethics-driven brand that’s interested in a thoughtful target customer, so do some research and find out where your customers are looking for your brand, and where they are likely to buy.