Social media can be a great and cheap (or free-ish) tool to market your business, but converting your followers to customers can be trickier. Now two of the image-based platforms have introduced much clearer call-to-actions to help you convert your social media followers to customers much easier. Read on to find out more about how the new buttons for Pinterest and Instagram can help your business.
Instagram “Shop Now” Button
With over 300 million users, Instagram is a powerful platform and can be a powerful sales tool if businesses know how to use it well. The one function it has had missing for businesses is easy call-to-actions and the ability to easily drive people through to their website. This new button could change that. It will fit in cleanly alongside the ‘like’ and ‘comment’ icons under images so that it’s in-keeping with the clean and simple browsing experience that Instagram aims for.
It can be customised as well to read “Shop Now”, “Install Now”, “Sign Up”, you get the idea. This is a huge improvement to the current Instagram experience for businesses, where it’s difficult to drive people to your site or convert them with clear call-to-actions. With this button, Instagram will become a much more powerful conversion tool. Instagram are also planning better targeting for sponsored posts so that businesses can get the posts to the people that might be planning on buying.
Pinterest “Buy It” Button
93% of Pinterest users are apparently planning their next shopping list and as well as using Pinterest for inspiration, they’re using it to hunt out things that they want to buy, and 87% of Pinterest users have purchased something as a result of Pinterest. So Pinterest are planning on capturing this interest. Apparently, the average price of an item someone plans to buy whilst browsing Pinterest is $50 (about £35), so that’s a pretty powerful sales tool!
The button is being released in stages, and will first be available in the US for certain big brands such as Macy’s and on the iOS platform first. Then it will roll out wider through big brands and Android devices, and hopefully it will be become available to smaller brands and businesses in the not-too-distant future. It’s rumoured that sites using the Shopify eCommerce platform will be able to use this function first.
There’s no missing the fact that these buttons can be mainly seen as useful for visually interesting eCommerce companies such as for clothing, home furnishings etc. However, I’m sure some clever and interesting uses of the buttons will start to appear once they’re in use and I’ll keep track of their progress to tell you more. If you want to integrate these buttons into your business marketing plan and need some help then give us a shout: hello@webfwd.co.uk
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