Nowadays, the line between social media and e-commerce is becoming increasingly blurry. Anytime you are surfing through your feed, you know to expect personalized ads, messages about products, and even a dashboard to directly shop on certain social media platforms. Instagram and Facebook both have made their way into the e-commerce arena, and now one of your new favorite apps will be making it oh-so easy to access any product you desire!
In the fourth quarter of 2020, Shopify and TikTok announced a new partnership in which merchants from Shopify can now create, run, and optimize marketing campaigns through TikTok. With time, they will expand the shopping experience on TikTok and presumably create a marketplace page similar to how Instagram has done as of late. Naturally, users will be providing data and information to Shopify to target a specific audience. It will take into consideration traditional demographics as well as activity, user behavior, and preferences. One of the features birthed from this partnership is “TikTok Pixel”, where merchants can connect and track conversions from their TikTok ad-campaigns far easier than the standard dashboards on Shopify. The best merchant ability with Pixel is that merchants from Shopify can post shoppable videos on their feed by selecting their product and using ad templates provided by Shopify. If you are still unsure that Tik-Tok campaigns are worth being a part of your budget, Shopify offers a $300 credit to start your first campaign. TikTok has a uniquely highly engaged community, which make this partnership with Shopify highly advantageous for businesses of any size.
This partnership may sound like another social network making a move to monetize their platform, and it is. We saw this same exact action from Instagram towards the end of 2020. Instagram has long been a place for merchants to sell and find new customers. For a time, it was simply targeted ads on your feed or stories. But now, Instagram has a separate feature on their menu that brings you directly to their Shop page. By taking out the extra steps of going directly to a company’s website, Instagram transitioned their platform into a marketplace for vendors of all types. There is a similar shopping experience on Facebook and their marketplace, so it was only a matter of time for the parent company (Facebook) to introduce the same onto Instagram.
Social media has taken on a life of its own in the past ten years, and now their users are seeing a shift on platforms to further monetize company efforts. These changes give companies of all sizes and locations a chance to compete, and reach audiences that were previously unreachable.
