We kicked off the official launch of the Social Commerce Accelerator with a presentation by Veronika Sonsev (CEO of inSparq) underlining social commerce best practices. The presentation covers useful tips on how to interact with your customers more effectively using social media networking sites Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & Email.

How exactly do you get your customers to share products with their friends using a sharing widget like inSparq? It’s very easy if you follow our social commerce best practices. Here are some of the tips we’ve learned through our own testing to optimize the virality of your products.

What are the results by sharing by channel? This is what we’ve seen so far.

Facebook has the most shared, then Pinterest, Email and finally Twitter.  The most interesting thing is that when you look at sharing from a sales perspective, the channel that drives the most revenue is Email. The reason for that is that Emails are a lot more personalized message to a specific person and the reality is that it has better results. Twitter drives the least sales through social sharing which is also reflective of what the eCommerce industry has seen with Twitter in general.

Sharing Best Practices:

1. Incentivize Social Actions – thank your customers for communicating their excitement and commitment to your brand

2. Incentivize multiple actors – offer both the customer who shared and their friends the same discount. Create a sense of urgency by including an expiration on the discount as well to encourage them to buy.

3. Keep your offer/campaign simple – we don’t recommend tying your discounts into a complicated point system (ex AirMiles) but keeping the benefits simple and straightforward. “Share and get $5″ or “share and get 15%” are good examples

4. Always test offers/campaigns – what works for one retailer might not work for another. One of our customers, Kembrel, is a flash site for the college market and offering them 20% off works well for them. Another customer sells unique gadgets and what motivates their customers to share is early access to inventory.

5. Rally your customers around a contest/sweepstakes – periodically you want to draw attention to new elements on your site so encourage your customers to try new sharing behaviors and notice those sharing buttons

Best Practices: Facebook

• Encourage customers to share – it starts with a Like on your home page to get them to opt in to your news and updates. Offer your customers a reward in exchange for their Like.
• Give shoppers the option of both posting on their timeline or via direct message – we recommend the inSparq widget because it gives you the option of posting on your wall, your friend’s wall and via direct message because every customer has different preferences.
• Make sure the image is relevant to the product (not your company logo)
• Keep copy simple: customers will include personalized messages to friends themselves