In 2012, Harvard professor David “Doc” Searls predicted that the market would thrive or fail due to its ability to bridge the gap between customer intent, commercial user experiences, and consumers’ need for privacy. Ten years later, we revisit his speculations in the age of social commerce.
How social media became an intent map
Searls fairly accurately predicted the future of social commerce in his 2012 book The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.
“Everyone The customer will enter the market, equipped with their own means of collecting and storing personal data, expressing requirements, making decisions, setting preferences, offering contract terms, offering payments and participating in relationships – whether these relationships are superficial or deep, and whether they last moments or years,” Sears writes. “These funds are standardized. No provider will control them.”
While consumers aren’t yet in complete control of their data, in many ways social media companies already have. When consumers turn to social media, they provide a wealth of search and behavioral data to social platforms, a practice that has drawn attention from the federal government for years. Corresponding a recent studythe average app can contact up to 15 domains, with 12 of those connections being initiated with unknown third-party domains.
This data allows these platforms to perform most of the Searls functions described above via only prediction algorithms. Surprisingly, social apps contacted the fewest URLs. Part of this may be because social apps have access to exceptional first-party data. Platforms today serve as proxies for customer intent, translating consumer behavior into insights that allow brand marketers to effectively target their audiences. But there’s a catch – banner ads still exist even on social media low click rates.
Today, brand marketers are shifting their spend to platforms that deliver content that consumers are enthusiastic about and sharing. TikTok, the social media platform with the highest user engagement, has one average observation rate of around 16 percent. This engagement is all the more valuable for brands as TikTok’s dominance of user interaction means it has somehow hooked into consumer intent and used those insights to deliver them $2.5 billion in consumer spending in 2021.
According to TikTok, consumers engage with content and take action on a regular basis. That means brand marketers can use insights from TikTok (or other platforms) to determine consumer intent and shorten the distance between intent and purchase through social commerce — given the platform’s regulatory and privacy concerns are addressed to.
The social commerce opportunity for brand marketers
With cookies becoming a thing of the past, first-party data from social platforms will be key to finding a way to identify intent and shorten the sales funnel. Social commerce meets the needs of brand marketers on all fronts, giving them access to insights from first-party data and making it easier for brands to grow sales via a native environment.
One easy way to do this is by collaborating with developers on platforms like TikTok. About 67 percent of the users surveyed said that TikTok she inspires to make a purchase and creator partnerships on TikTok saw a 193 percent increase in video view-through rate for brands, according to Hootsuite. According to eMarketer, US social commerce sales are expected to range $45.74 billion by the end of the year, with more than half of the country’s adults making a purchase through social media.
The top reasons why social media users have not made a purchase through a social media platform range from a preference to buy direct from the brand to a need for clarification on how secure payments are. For brand marketers looking to engage consumers on social, solving payment problems and building branded ecommerce experiences will be key to engagement as social commerce grows. But brands shouldn’t forget, as Searls points out in his original article on the concept that the intention economy is more than just transactional: “Conversations matter. So relationships. This also applies to prestige, authority and respect. However, these virtues are deserved be “branded” in the minds of buyers by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just sellers, like the ranchers’ symbols branded on the hides of cattle.”
For Searls, a self-confessed advocate for privacy, ad engineers and media need to focus on something deeper than driving clicks. Businesses should design their reach based on customer intent—the needs and preferences that users are willing to share. While Searls is a harsh critic of all things sign making, his is Words can provide some insights for marketers.
“So what can we do?” Sears writes. “The simple and difficult answer is to start building tools for individuals and services that use those tools. These are tools that offer individuals better ways to connect with the world’s organizations, especially businesses […] Build some of these, and we’ll have an intention economy that will do far more for business than what it’s getting from the attention economy now, regardless of how much money that economy is making today.”
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