Why This Is Social Media’s Best Holiday Season Yet
By Lisa Tranum
Retailers can directly display their products on Lish, which exposes the product to a broader base of shoppers compared to hosting the products only on their own retail websites. While the idea is great for consumers and retailers alike, there has been some snarking. TechCrunch called Lish “an impulse shopping site for cheap ridiculousness.”
Cheap ridiculousness aside, impulse buying represents a huge potential market for Facebook. By hosting flash sales it can capitalize on the I-don’t-know-if-I-want-this-but-if-I-don’t-buy-it’s-gone-forever reaction. Social media dominates here because users are prompted to post flash sale items on their newsfeeds, enticing more people to participate, and, in turn, spreading the flash sale buy-now hysteria.
With all these new vehicles online, is anyone still willing to do their shopping the traditional route in brick-and-mortar stores? Undoubtedly yes. The secret to keeping social media approaches in harmony with more traditional retail strategies is to use them in tandem. Look at Neiman Marcus, one of the first retailers to utilize Facebook Collections. It started two collections, “Borrowed From the Boys” and “Leather Leg” that showcase the pieces in these two lines. Neiman’s 600,000 fans can look through and buy straight from the page, something that they may not have done without the collections so readily available to them.
Social media is affecting holiday sales this year like never before. Whether this is a positive or negative for retailers depends on how quickly and how effectively they can leverage these new sales vehicles. And they had better hurry. The holidays are coming soon.
Lisa Tranum is the CEO and co-founder of BluMoxy, the leading social media memory book service. She has a passion for online scrapbooking, photography and photo editing. As an entrepreneur, she is a sought-after speaker for women’s conferences and has sponsored events such as Mama’s Write. Before founding BluMoxy, Lisa served as marketing coordinator for a number of companies, including the Service Group Insurance and Financial Company, Tranum Auto Group and the Republic National Distributing Company.