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Social commerce strategies to turn engagement into sales
Learn how to integrate social commerce with ecommerce platforms like Salesforce to boost sales, track customer journeys, and connect engagement to revenue.
Learn how to integrate social commerce with ecommerce platforms like Salesforce to boost sales, track customer journeys, and connect engagement to revenue.
Your Instagram has 50,000 followers. Your TikTok videos get thousands of likes. Your social engagement looks incredible.
But your sales numbers tell a different story.
We see this disconnect constantly. Businesses pour resources into creating content, growing audiences, and running social campaigns, then wonder why their revenue doesn't match their engagement metrics.
The problem isn't your content or your audience. It's that your social platforms and ecommerce systems aren't talking to each other.
It’s time to turn your social scrollers into paying customers.
Why do most businesses struggle to connect their social presence with actual revenue? During technical audits, the first thing to examine is whether social platforms connect to ecommerce infrastructure. Most businesses don't.
(We recently revealed the hidden cost of outdated ecommerce platforms).
While social commerce adoption is growing rapidly, many businesses still struggle with technical integration challenges:
Without these integrations, you're flying blind. A customer might discover your product on Instagram, research it on your website, and purchase three days later through Google search. Your analytics shows three separate, unconnected events.
You can't optimise what you can't measure.
The connection between social engagement and revenue requires proper customer journey mapping to become visible.
Most businesses face the same challenge: strong social engagement with zero visibility into how those interactions influence sales.
Their setup relies on vanity metrics.
None of this data feeds back into their ecommerce platform or informs campaign decisions.
To connect these dots, businesses need to integrate product catalogues directly with social channels, configure tracking pixels properly, and build unified dashboards that combine social data, on-site behaviour, and checkout activity.
This approach provides clearer insights. Instead of measuring success by engagement alone, businesses can see exactly which posts, campaigns, and audiences drive purchases.
It also creates shopping journeys that feel more consistent across channels. Customers no longer hit friction points when moving from Instagram to your website.
Omnichannel analytics require pulling data from multiple sources that most businesses track in isolation:
But here's what gets really interesting. Cross-channel impact.
Here's how cross-channel impact works:
Take a retailer launching a campaign on Instagram or TikTok that builds excitement around a new product. The immediate engagement happens on social, but there are often knock-on effects in completely different channels.
Email subscribers who've seen the social campaign are more likely to open and click through when the matching email arrives, because the message feels familiar. Customers who don't buy directly from a social ad might later search for the product by name, driving stronger performance in paid search.
These ripple effects are easy to miss if you're only tracking social in isolation.
Fragmented user journeys complicate attribution and measurement, as consumers may discover products on one platform, research on another, and purchase on a third.
When businesses unify data across channels, they discover that social isn't just a standalone tactic but the thread that connects awareness to purchase, often in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
Unified attribution connects every touchpoint in the customer journey, from initial social discovery to final purchase, creating a complete view of how different channels work together.
Social commerce is projected to reach $107.17 billion in 2025, making technical requirements absolutely critical.
The moment someone clicks from a social post to purchase, the system needs to capture the source data instantly. Which platform, which product, which campaign drove the interaction.
Within milliseconds, that click should be enriched with additional context. Previous browsing behaviour, loyalty membership details, existing purchase history from platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
This enriched data creates context-aware experiences shaped by real-time signals. The system can surface products that match their browsing history, show offers that align with their current interests, and adjust messaging based on how they arrived at your site.
Once the purchase completes, data flows back into both the ecommerce platform and social attribution systems. This closes the loop, providing clearer visibility into how social interactions contribute to revenue.
The complexity comes from connecting systems that weren't designed to communicate. Different data formats, tracking standards, attribution models.
The most effective approach involves comprehensive customer journey mapping first, identifying critical data points that need to move in real time, then connecting them efficiently through unified attribution models.
How can enterprise platforms handle the complexity of social commerce integration? Salesforce Commerce Cloud excels as an enterprise ecommerce foundation, handling transactions, inventory, and customer management with proven reliability.
Businesses can extend their Salesforce setup by integrating additional data sources that complement its core strengths. This means connecting behavioural data from social platforms, paid channels, loyalty programmes, and offline activity directly into existing Salesforce ecosystems.
This integration builds on Salesforce's existing customer intelligence by layering in live social behaviour. The result shows customers products they're actually interested in right now, not just what they bought six months ago.
Consider that livestream shopping conversion rates reach 30%, ten times higher than regular ecommerce.
Ecommerce benchmarks show that brands integrating user-generated content see up to 6x higher conversion rates. But these results only materialise if your inventory synchronisation and payment processing work flawlessly across channels.
If you need some proven methods to optimise ecommerce platform performance, look no further.
Does social media actually drive ecommerce sales? The biggest misconception is that social commerce automatically drives sales just because you have large audiences or high engagement.
Businesses invest heavily in content creation, follower growth, and paid campaigns, expecting immediate, direct returns. When that doesn't happen, they assume social doesn't work.
Social commerce works best as part of a connected customer journey, not a standalone channel. People discover products on Instagram, research on your website, sign up for emails, then purchase days later through another platform entirely.
Without joined-up data, this journey looks disconnected. Businesses underestimate social's role in driving intent.
Measuring social in the context of the entire buying journey, rather than just last-click conversions, makes the picture much clearer. This leads to smarter budget allocation, better-targeted campaigns, and a realistic view of what social actually contributes to your bottom line.
With social networks expected to reach over 17% of total online sales, and enhanced attribution models now enabling 14-day tracking windows for live-stream impact, understanding these integrations becomes increasingly important for retail businesses.
As technology continues to advance, connecting social engagement with revenue measurement remains a key challenge for businesses to address.
Lift your digital offering with design and strategy that's backed by real user data.
Social commerce is growing quickly, but success depends on more than creating engaging posts. Businesses need to connect their social channels to their ecommerce systems so that every interaction is measurable and meaningful.
The most important steps are making sure product catalogues sync with social platforms, tracking pixels capture the full journey, and attribution models show how different channels influence each other.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a reliable foundation for this, and extending its value with integrated data from social, loyalty, and paid activity creates a more complete view of customer behaviour.
The retailers that thrive will be those who treat social as part of a wider connected journey that drives awareness, intent, and ultimately sales.
Social commerce increases sales by reducing the gap between discovery and purchase. When platforms are integrated with ecommerce systems, customers can move from seeing a product to buying it in a few clicks, and businesses can see exactly how those interactions drive revenue.
Unified attribution connects all customer touchpoints - social, email, search, and onsite activity - into one journey. This gives businesses a clearer picture of how different channels work together to generate sales.
Yes. Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a strong ecommerce foundation, and businesses can extend its value by connecting it with social platforms. This lets behavioural and engagement data sit alongside Salesforce’s customer and transactional data, creating a fuller view of how social drives purchasing decisions.
The hardest challenges are technical. Product catalogues often sit in isolation, pixels capture incomplete data, and attribution models differ across platforms. Without joining these systems up, businesses struggle to connect engagement to revenue.
The key metrics are product-linked social engagement, onsite behaviour such as add-to-basket rates and drop-offs, and revenue attribution tied to campaigns or posts. Cross-channel insights are also essential, since social activity often improves performance in other areas like email or paid search.
No. While in-app purchases are part of it, social commerce also sparks intent and discovery that lead to sales elsewhere. Customers might find a product on social media, research it on a website, and later buy through search or email. Measuring this wider influence shows social’s real impact.
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