Social commerce expert urges retailers to take advantage of the larger captive audience on their own sites with in-built social features   The top retailers in the UK have on average 10 times more unique users on their websites in one month than they do overall the global 'likes' on their main Facebook pages, according to new findings published recently.  

Social commerce expert urges retailers to take advantage of the larger captive audience on their own sites with in-built social features

The top retailers in the UK have on average 10 times more unique users on their websites in one month than they do overall the global 'likes' on their main Facebook pages, according to new findings published recently.

The comparison made by social integration and recommendations engine, nToklo, suggests that these retailers have a much larger captive audience on their own sites to draw on for brand loyalty than they are likely to garner through developing a store on Facebook.

The company urged brands to take advantage of their large existing communities by adding social features to their existing sites, rather than just focusing on developing a Facebook store to satisfy a social commerce proposition. Social features will also help retailers to ‘get to know’ their website users and play a similar role to loyalty schemes in developing a clearer audience view for more targeted marketing.

Home grown traffic delivers greater scale

nToklo looked at the monthly website traffic of ten top online retail sites from a UK and global audience and compared this with the number of global Facebook ‘likes’ (using this measure as a loyalty metric) on each brand’s main official page.

The biggest difference came with Tesco and John Lewis, which had 3.2 million and 1.5 million unique UK users respectively, compared with just over 61,000 and 31,000 Facebook fans. The company said these statistics show that these retailers have a captive audience on their website of 52 and 48 times the size their corresponding Facebook page audiences.

Gareth Mee, nToklo chief executive, commented: “While Facebook ‘likes’ are certainly not the be-all and end-all when it comes to measuring a brand's engagement on the social network, it does give a good indication of how much larger the captive audience top retails brands already have on their website is than the audience they are likely to reach through a Facebook store, certainly in the short term. The message here is not ‘don’t try to sell on Facebook,’ but retailers should be taking a multi-pronged approach to social commerce, adding social features to their own sites to drive engagement, sales and to get to know more of their users.”

nToklo chose the sample of ten top UK retailers using Hitwise statistics as a guide. The figures for site visits and Facebook page likes were then obtained in March 2011 using Google Ad Planner and Facebook respectively.