750 – The epic battle to get more customers: Tom talks Social Selling vs Commerce

Episode 750 – Social Selling vs Commerce
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 750 of Screw the Commute podcast. Think about that 750 episodes. We're three quarters of the way to a thousand. Wow. Haven't lost my voice yet either. Today, we're going to talk about social selling versus social commerce. Now, many marketers get these two things mixed up, but I'm going to clear that up for you in this episode. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 749. That was where you have to now call me Captain Tom because I was talking about the drone business and making your hobbies tax deductible. So check that out. Episode 749 How you listen to a back episode you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 749. And make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and pick up a copy of our free automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and you will thank me if you use this even a little bit of what's in that book because it saved me thousands and thousands and hours and we actually figured millions of keystrokes. So check that out screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:40] All right. Let's get to the main event, social selling versus versus social commerce. Well, what the heck are they and what's the difference? All right. Let's take social selling first. Now, this is what I've been engaged in since social media came about. I mean, I've said numerous times that to me, social media is a necessary evil.

[00:02:05] All right? Because you have to have it. But it can be an enormous time waster. And to me, social media and social selling are to get people the heck off of social media and onto an email list where I can control the contacts with the particular person or group of people. See in social media. You don't own any of those people or contacts or likes or anything. It all belongs to the social media platform. So if they make a change, you can disappear off the face of the earth, don't have contacts with your people. And even if you do have a bunch of people, they make you pay to reach them. Okay, so. So that's the necessary evil I talk about now. Social commerce is the concept of the entire transaction. Selling to people occurs on social media and frequently in the app the person is already in. In other words, they never leave wherever they are to make a purchase. Now, this is something that I'm going to be forced to explore more in depth in the future for my own business. Because people clearly are enamored with social media and frequently they spend hours on it scrolling through YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and TikTok. All right, so back to social selling as opposed to social commerce. Now. It's going to be a long time before I give up on email. All right. Still to this day, the big players make the bulk of their money on email.

[00:03:43] There's no question about that. But that's because once you get someone on your email list, you can pretty much be sure to reach them as long as you keep up your email sender reputation, which we covered in other episodes so that your emails aren't getting filtered. And this is in stark, stark contrast to your social media followers who, once they follow, you, may never see your content again unless you pay for ads. Now, I don't like this, and I saw this coming as far back as zero four and zero five. When Facebook started. They were pretty much begging you to get people to like you, and then gradually they started making you pay. If you wanted all those people that you killed yourself to get to like you to actually see you. I saw this coming, and that's why I don't even look that great on social media, but make a lot of money because of my email list. And think about this. Some estimates say that as low as 1% of people see your social media posts because you're doing a poor job of engagement. So I suggest that for many of you, no one sees your posts, but you have wasted tons of time creating your posts religiously. Well, most people in the know about social media suggest you post less. Make sure your posts are super high quality and. You know, beg your friends to, like comment, save and share your posts immediately when they're released or hopefully within the first hour or so.

[00:05:27] So why within the first hour? Well, because of the concept of micro tests. If the social media platform and pretty much all of them are the same. If no one engages with your stuff in the first hour, then that's pretty much the end of it. You wasted all this time making this post and nobody on earth sees it except you. The social media platforms figure Why should we show your stuff to more people if nobody's engaging with it? In other words, they're wasting their bandwidth on you and they don't. Won't do it. So your job, if you're going to bother with social selling, is to do whatever begging and prodding you have to do to get your friends and family to engage immediately with your stuff. If you ever want to have any success with social media. And from the social selling standpoint, then you do whatever you can to get the new people that see your stuff off of social media and onto your email list where you can continue or start a relationship with them to eventually turn them into customers or better yet, customers for life. Okay, let's go back to social commerce as opposed to social selling. So I read an article on Hootsuite that said that 81% of shoppers research products on Instagram and Facebook and shopping, of course, on Pinterest and I've talked about this on previous episodes, is a top priority for 48% of Pinterest users.

[00:07:10] They're there to buy something to figure out what to buy. So if they can buy it right there, then you've increased your chance of making an immediate sale. Now, to me, you know, being around as long as I have, I'm thinking to have consistent success with social commerce. Unless you have a massive really engaged following, you pretty much have to to get in really good at advertising on that platform. And advertising online can be a risky business and you really need to be willing and to and have a budget to experiment until you find the combination of ad copy and and placement of where and when to put the ads that works for you. Now, this can be a very costly proposition. So set aside quite a bit of money to do this, and I'm not saying it can't be done, but it does carry a high level of risk and an expertise that most marketers just don't have. Now, does social commerce work? Absolutely. It works. I've bought lots of stuff that way, but this is a big but. On the other hand, you can't really rely on the statistics you get from the ad platforms. See, lots of times I've seen something online and then I just go to Amazon and check it out, check the reviews and buy it rather than buy it on the app I'm in because I know if the product sucks, I won't have I'll have little or no trouble at all returning it through Amazon.

[00:08:48] I don't know this for most everything when it comes to social media commerce purchases. So what this will do is throw off your statistics and maybe cause you to kill a great ad because it looks like no one is buying from the ad when in effect, the ad is producing lots of sales, just not right there on that platform. So your ad and sales statistics on that platform look worse than they are, in other words. So you've got to really be savvy to do to get into this advertising game. Now, social media is where millennials and Gen Z like to shop. See if you if your target demographic is in like the 18 to 34 year range, well, guess what they love? They're ready to shop online. No problem. If you're selling to that age range, it looks like you need to get competent to selling directly online. And and so if you want to look into this, there's places like Facebook shops, Instagram shops, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok all have abilities to do this. Here's the thing, though. Each of these places has certain requirements for you to have a shop so that they don't have a bunch of riff raff in there. Now, keep in mind, having a shop is different than advertising.

[00:10:14] Anybody can advertise except if prohibited products like guns and stuff. But. But but I think like, for instance, Facebook has one of their requirements says you have to have a business page with at least 2000 likes to kind of prove that you're real before they bother letting you have a shop. But anyway, if you want to pursue this, you just Google requirements for a Facebook shop. Or you could substitute requirements for an Instagram shop or Pinterest or Snapchat or know TikTok whatever you want, but just search for requirements for blank shop. So social selling, which is what I do in social commerce, are two similar but different things. You're selling stuff, but it's the mechanism that you're doing it with that's different and you need to know the difference and decide what's best for you. And maybe both might be best for you. So I'm into social selling, but as I go along, I may be forced into more social commerce as the Millennials and Gen Z-ers who are used to this kind of buying as they age. As they get more into my target market, we got to see how this goes. And also I'm forced to do it right now for younger people to attend my school, the older people attend my school. They come from all kinds of places that know me from email and all the summits I'm on and all this and this podcast and everything. But but these young people thinking about going to college or trade school, well, guess what? They're in that age group that I've got to be where they are.

[00:11:56] They're not going to come to where I am. So. So this is what you have to decide for yourself. So if you want help with this in all kinds of stuff, you got to be successful online. Check out my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing at great Internet marketing training.com. And then also, I got this new program on how to be a great podcast guest. Of course, my mentees get that free, but this is something where I'll teach you how to be in front of tens of thousands of people. And it's not just because you're glib and you're good on on the interview, there's all these other things that you that you must do to impress the heck out of the host so they invite you back and refer you. So, so these are the kinds of things that I'll teach you. So check that out at screw the commute.com slash. Great podcast guest. I think we have five slots left. It's one on one me and you, you know on the phone for four sessions including you get a feature on this podcast Screw the commute. So so check it out. All right we'll catch you all on the next episode. See you later.