Lessons from how Amazon has approached digital marketing & sales using social media

I thought it would be interesting to look at how a leading online brand, Amazon, has approached the use of social media for digital marketing and selling purposes.  I decided to focus specifically on social media given these facts:

• Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online is spent on social media (ComScore, ‘The State of Social Media’ February 2012);
• Over half of consumer-facing Fortune 500 companies are ‘socially shy’ and do not provide a twitter handle or link to their facebook page from their company website contact page (Genesys, August 2012);
• Tech tracking firms decry the value of social networks to drive actual sales: for all the time spent on their sites, facebook and Twitter are estimated to have driven only 0.53% of all US online sales on Black Friday in 2011 (IBM/ Coremetrics). 

Amazon.com has an interesting track record in its engagement with social media. It was an early pioneer of social networking in the 1990s by its practice of encouraging users to share book reviews. But after this progressive start, it lagged behind in the adoption of emerging social media technologies and failed to embrace facebook or Twitter when they first appeared.

In 2010, everything changed.

Amazon integrated its site with facebook to create what it calls the ‘Amazon/facebook shopping experience.’ This integration application allows users to see a list of their friends’ birthdays and interests, along with suggestions for gifts from Amazon. Users are also offered Amazon’s ‘Gold Box’ daily deals, which offer a limited number of discounts on a first-buy basis. The same year, Amazon also released an application for its Kindle that integrated social media into book readings, allowing users to share book passages with followers on facebook or Twitter.

A few statistics show the impact these ventures into social media have had:

• Amazon’s Facebook page attracted more than 2.12 million fans in its first 15 months and now stands at somewhere around 2.5 million users;
• Amazon’s Facebook page has now passed 20 million ‘likes’;
• Amazon’s Twitter account attracted 401,253 followers in its first year, with the total today standing at 603,556.

A differentiator for Amazon’s adoption of social media is its strong focus on getting users to buy, rather than just ‘follow’. As an example, in the lead-up to the US ‘Black Friday,’ Amazon posted messages on its Facebook and Twitter pages urging followers to tell friends about special holiday deals. Statistics for the success of transitioning customers from more passive ‘following’ to buying are rare but a 2011 JP Morgan report assessed that ‘referral traffic’ in October 2010 from Amazon’s Facebook page to its ecommerce site was up by 7.7%. Given the ease of one-click shopping and its strong conversion record, Amazon is believed to enjoy sell rates way about the average for social media.

The lesson? It may have taken its time to launch on social media platforms, but Amazon’s strength in consumer management and platform integration has given it a real edge in turning social media into an effective marketing and up-selling platform.