The web was buzzing last week with news of the Facebook IPO. Much of the news seemed to focus around Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth and the new crop of millionaires that will be made out of Facebook employees.  Silicon Valley exotic car dealers and real estate agents have probably been lined up outside Facebook HQ handing out business cards. With Facebook’s estimated valuation now a staggering $75 to $100 billion you may be wondering how on earth a company with revenues of $3.7 billion could be with that much.  I certainly am.

When you look at the stats surrounding Facebook, you realize that their potential to grow revenue is equally as staggering.  For instance, Facebook now has 845 million active users which represents a 45 percent increase since 2010.  More than half of their users return to the site each day.  And these users have produced an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments each day in the last three months of 2011. Now, when you consider the wealth of information Facebook has about it’s users and how they enable advertisers to target based on this, you begin to see the potential for a much greater share of advertising dollars. I think it’s only a matter of time before brand advertisers and businesses discover this and start fighting over the ad inventory as they now do on Google.

But what about retailers?  How can they cash in on Facebook’s success?  To start with, retailers need to have a presence on Facebook by building a page. I know this is obvious and hard to imagine that any retailer has not yet claimed their brand on Facebook but I still come across retailers who have not.  Having a page on Facebook enables their massive audience to “Like” your brand and start sharing what they think of you with their friends.

The ability to post comments about your store on Facebook has become a powerful tool for retailers to generate content from their customers. For example, asking a question on your Facebook wall to find out what your fans like most about a particular product is a great way to generate positive feedback and endorsement for that product.  Then, what makes this even more powerful is when you have your site search technology crawl these Facebook posts and make them available in your site search results. Retailers can now instantly reach out to their most engaged brand advocates and ask them all sorts of questions.  Questions like how they are using products, what advice they have for others for selecting the best product for a particular solution, what tips they have for using your products, and on and on.  All of this fantastic content can them be made available to new visitors through site search.

To encourage more sharing, retailers have begun placing Facebook like buttons on the product pages. This practice has exploded in the past year to the point where it feels hard to find retailers who don’t include a Like button.  Generating likes for your products shows an even deeper engagement from your customers and is a much more powerful way to drive sales.  The challenge is to actually get your customers to click the like button.  It seems consumer adoption of this has been relatively low.

One thing retailers like FTD.com have done to grow their product like activity is incorporate the Like button directly into their site search results.  This gives it much more visibility and from a usability perspective is much easier for people to click like as they browse products in search results.  There’s even a added usability benefit as retailers have incorporated the ability to sort search results by the number of likes.  I expect that the desire to sort by likes might actually become more popular than sorting by product star ratings. And, this added functionality will encourage that many more consumers to cast their vote for a product by clicking the like button.

FTD.com Search Includes Facebook Likes

The final tip I would have for cashing in on Facebook’s popularity is to enable those who visit your page on Facebook to initiate a search of your product catalog easily right from within your page.  This can be done by adding a tab on your page that includes a search box and incorporating the search functionality into your other custom tabs such as your Facebook default page.  Here’s an example from Chaparral Motorsports.

Chaparral Motorsports Enables Search on Facebook

Retailers are collecting an amazing amount of priceless content from their customers comments on social networking sites like Facebook.  Unfortunately, much of this great content only reaches a limited audience because of how social media works.  For the most part, people only see what others are talking about right now.  It is a fast flowing stream that is nearly impossible to keep up with.  Without some way to pause the flow of content and capture it for later use, the value that this content can provide your business is dramatically reduced.

Although this situation sounds bleak, SLI Systems is providing a solution for many retailers that extends the life of their Facebook and social media content by allowing it to be discovered through their site’s search results.  I think the best way to illustrate the benefits of this is to provide some use case examples.

Let’s start with an example from 24 Hour Fitness.  If you are looking for a fun way to shed a few extra holiday pounds you might be searching for “exercise class ideas.”  As a 24 Hour Fitness member, or someone who just happens to come across their site, if you searched for that phrase you would find a wide assortment of results including pages, videos, products, social networks, and their blog and forum.  With a social networks tab showing 78 results that would be a good place to start for find unbiased advice.

The top result is from a Facebook post that asks, “What Group Exercise class best compliments your personal training routine and why?” Clicking this takes you a 24 Hour Fitness Facebook page showing the 50 most recent comments out of a total of 169 that they received.  The comments provide an incredible list of recommendations and endorsements from existing customers about all types of exercise classes such as Body Pump, Turbo Kick, Yoga and Zumba.  What’s great about this is that all of this content was created after 24 Hour Fitness posted the question back on November 18th of 2011 and now it’s all easily accessible everyday to customers searching their site for this information.

In another example, let’s say you just saw a TV commercial for the new Smart Touch gloves from Totes Isotoner and you want to find out what their people are saying about these gloves.  A good place to start would be the Totes Isotoner site with a search for “Smart Touch Gloves.”  This search would present you with a Social Media tab that had six results. 

Under the Social Media tab, you would learn about the gloves being featured on the Today Show and discover this great product endorsement posted as a comment on their Facebook wall back on January 10th.

Finally, if you are an aspiring fashion jewelry designer, one of your biggest challenges is coming up with a color scheme for your next jewelry design.  At Artbeads.com, if you searched for “color scheme” you would find five results under their community tab.

The top result from Facebook calls your attention to a free online tool called the Color Scheme Designer. Click the link and you’ll see a screen shot of the designer posted on January 2nd. You’ll also be able to read the many comments from other jewelry designers expressing their challenges about picking colors. Seeing this sort of content from people just like you will help you feel more a part of the community and give you a good reason to “Like” Artbeads.com on Facebook.

With the ability to include content from your Facebook wall and other social media sites in site search results, retailers can get much more mileage from their social media content. And, more importantly, they will be better able to harness the power of their customers for creating content. One way to do this is to look through your sites search phrases for questions customers are asking. Then, turn these questions into Facebook posts and let your community provide the answers. This strategy would be especially useful if your site was lacking content in these areas.

What other ideas do you have for Facebook posts that would engage your customers and inspire them to create quality content for your store? Post your ideas in the comments below.

How about sharing your thoughts on what 2012 will bring?

I’ll start – While 2011 could be called the year eRetailers got interested in mobile and social media, 2012 will likely be the year of the tablet, and … more social media.

As retailers begin to understand how people search, shop, and consume content on mobile devices, the soaring popularity of the iPad (one of the must-have items on people’s holiday wish lists this year), presents new challenges for retailers, as well as for those of us who provide products and services to them, in delivering a compelling shopping experience on the new “fourth screen.”

For tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire, the requirements for creating user-friendly search and navigation experiences are different than those for the mobile screen. We have more screen real estate to work with when it comes to tablets, which means a better display of product images and an easier-to-use touchscreen. On the other hand, “t-commerce” or “couch-commerce” will require a different experience than what is displayed on a personal computer or mobile screen. Site owners (and companies like ours) need to brainstorm ways to take advantage of the benefits of tablets (like brilliant displays of photos and videos), while keeping navigation streamlined.

For instance, tapping the screen is the standard method of navigation for tablets. However, small text menus – for instance, which you might find in lists of refinements – are hard to tap on without hitting another menu item by mistake. The same goes for buttons that are too close together, or pagination numbers: easy to click on with a mouse, tough to click on with a finger. In addition, as GetElastic reports, tablets are making it possible for website visitors to interact with content in new ways: people can “touch” content, swiping and zooming to choose how they view text and images. This tactile interaction may cause us to discover new ways to present information, new ways to display navigation, and new possibilities for innovative merchandising and SEO.

Users spend lots of time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and now Pinterest. We can expect that the merging of e-commerce and social media will gain even more prominence in the months ahead. As we’ve discussed before in this blog, site owners have realized that if people are spending more and more time with their friends on social networks, the website search and shopping experience needs to come to the social setting – instead of trying to lure people away from their social networks.

Now, your turn. What are your predictions for 2012?

Did Mobile Commerce Really Drive the Growth in eCommerce Holiday Sales?

Like I said in my previous blog: This Holiday season was great. According to IBM, who produces two benchmark reports tracking online sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, sales increased 33% over 2010 says. And it would seem that we all skipped the nap after our Thanksgiving meals to get a head start on shopping.  Thanksgiving day sales grew by the largest amount, up 39.3 percent with Black Friday up by 24.3 percent and Cyber Monday up 33 percent.

Home goods and department stores saw the greatest gains on Cyber Monday with increases from 2010 of 68 percent and 60 percent respectively.  Looking a little deeper at the data it was interesting to see that both of these categories showed significant gains in their conversion rates.  Home goods retailers were up over 22 percent and department stores saw conversion rate increases of over 16 percent.

Improving conversion rates is a major initiative for every ecommerce exec so the big question on my mind was how did they achieve such strong gains.  Did they offer better deals than last year?  Had they redesign their site to improve usability?  Or, did this increase in conversion have something to do with the surge in mobile commerce activity?

On Cyber Monday, IBM reported that traffic from mobile devices was up 161 percent and mobiles share of total sales had grown by almost 200 percent.  The data from Black Friday showed similar gains and indicated that mobile was responsible for nearly 10 percent of total sales. Conversion rates from mobile were up as well with Cyber Monday showing an increase of 26 percent and Black Friday up by 32 percent.  Mobile commerce clearly had a hand in these conversion rate improvements and since this data was in aggregate, it could have had an even bigger impact on the home goods and department store categories.

These retailers have definitely been making significant investments in mobile initiatives this year.  Just about every major department store has launched new mobile websites and apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.  The improvements were focused on building features to make shopping easier.  For instance, search functionality was enhanced to include refinements and sorting.  The new apps for the most part included the ability to create shopping lists and some like those from Sears, Macy’s, Kohl’s and Target even added the ability to scan QR and barcodes so finding product information was even easier.

Department stores are also at the head of the pack in terms of their mobile site performance.  Sears, J.C. Penny and Walmart are consistently ranked at the top of the weekly Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.  To speed up access, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s have gone even further by adding free Wi-Fi service this year in most stores.

Aside from the mobile initiatives, I think Free Shipping promotions were another factor that likely led to the conversion rate improvements.  At the end of August, Nordstrom began offering Free Shipping for the majority of items. On Cyber Monday, Macy’s dropped their minimum order value to qualify for free shipping from $99 to $75 and Kohls.com completely eliminated their $50 minimum purchase requirement.

I’m sure an interview with the heads of ecommerce at these major department stores would reveal many more actions they took to improve conversion rates.  Until then, I would love to hear what changes you have made to drive higher conversion rates and find out how that is working out.  Share you thoughts in the comments box below.