The Impact of Social Media on E-Commerce

Learn about the impact of social media on e-commerce and how it can help businesses excel in a crowded online marketplace. Understand the benefits of utilizing social media platforms for marketing and engaging with target consumers. Explore the theory of time allocation and the importance of bringing entertainment value to social media users. Discover strategies for creating a consistent social media presence and unifying branding for e-commerce sites.

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Standing out as an e-commerce site in this modern business world is not an easy task.
However, by fully embracing social media as a tool for marketing can help a business to
excel through a crowded online marketplace. According to Zhao et al. (2016), the benefit
from social media is undeniable if an individual knows how to put the right content to target a
specific group of people. When it comes to e-commerce, being active in social media
platform really impacts business success. In fact, several small businesses have shown the
advantages of gaining the attention of the social media audience by advertising their products
and services over the social platform. Consequently, it is been decided to utilise the social
media platform for the present e-commerce site and impact the business proposal. According
to Laudon & Traver (2014), social media platform is an advantage for an e-commerce site
because cost of marketing is almost negligible and allows the business to engage a large
population of target consumer around the world at the same time. The usage of social media
is rampant among the urban population and impacts every consumer’s life. According to the
reports, over 2.13 billion were found to be active users over Facebook in 2017 (Hajli, N.,
2018). For marketing professionals, it is a challenge to understand how social media channels
are producing an impact on e-commerce businesses.
Here the theory of time allocation can be applied in order to distinguish two different
platforms, e-commerce and social networks. Both offer two different information,
experiences and entertainment. The time allocation model suggests that people tend to choose
spending time over social media over e-commerce websites. Therefore, when an e-commerce
business incorporates the social media platform as a cost-effective marketing tool, it has to
consider bringing an entertainment value which is most important for a social media user. A
positive buying behaviour can be generated if the informational value is correlated with
bringing value-added services to the customer which also increase the purchase activity. As
per the findings form an international article it indicates that a long term relationship of an e-
commerce site over social media produces a positive impact by increasing its probability of
online purchases (Abed et al. 2015). This is because users engage a long period of time in
social media to consume the content which improves the probability of the user to purchase
over e-commerce websites.
However, with own experience, it is observed that social media only act as a gateway
to e-commerce websites. The site is required to highlight a social presence by spending
valuable time to craft posts that encourage and attracts the desired consumers. Further, it is
also important for creating a strategy before entering into social media. For a new business

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proposal, it is recommended to start with few channels and produce a consistent tone which
reflects the business idea. The posts over social media should be primarily based on recent
conversation and both research and intuition should be incorporated within a social media
marketing strategy. By focusing on producing high-quality product information along with
business background and logo will help the e-commerce site in crafting a consistent presence
and unify branding over social media.

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References
Abed, S.S., Dwivedi, Y.K. and Williams, M.D., 2015. Social media as a bridge to e-
commerce adoption in SMEs: A systematic literature review. The Marketing Review, 15(1),
pp.39-57.
Hajli, N., 2018. Social commerce constructs and consumer's intention to buy. International
Journal of Information Management, 35(2), pp.183-191.
Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2014). E-commerce: business, technology, society.
Zhao, W.X., Li, S., He, Y., Chang, E.Y., Wen, J.R. and Li, X., 2016. Connecting social
media to e-commerce: Cold-start product recommendation using microblogging
information. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 28(5), pp.1147-1159.