India to bring next level innovation in social commerce, say experts

The Impact Digital Influencer Conference held on the 30th of November saw a panel discussion around the topic of ‘Social Commerce - redesigning the future of Influencer Marketing’. With influencers rapidly becoming a huge part of brands and their growth, social commerce has been a space where influencers can be used to make a huge difference on the entire customer lookout of a brand.

The panel discussion was chaired by Atique Kazi, President - Data, Performance & Digital Products, GroupM and comprised of Apoorva Maheshwari, Head of Marketing, Bestseller, Iffat Jivan, Business Head, Ed-a-Mamma, Anusree Menon, Segment & Content Marketing Lead, Vi Business and Kunwar Raj, Finance Influencer.

The panellists discussed what social commerce meant to each of them, and gave similar but still diverse definition of the concept.

Sharing her views, Anusree Menon said: “Social Commerce for me is when there is a path to discovery and shop ability within the platform itself. I would categorize that as social commerce. What it is not is what I would like to emphasize very specifically on, because many marketers make the assumption or presumption that it's performance, ad or content that is linked to your direct ad buys. So that is not social commerce, that is specifically performance-driven. So, we really need to be sure what social commerce is and what it is not, to therefore identify whether it is really relevant for your category and deep dive into it.

Talking about the power of social media, Iffat Jivan says, “Coming from a brand that is hugely content and storytelling driven, we use a lot of our content storytelling to drive all our stories on our IG handles, and we actually notice that a lot of traffic that comes first, we have the highest conversion rate coming from our IG handles. So, it's basically - give good content to consume and offer shopping opportunities.”

Apoorva Maheshwari spoke about attributes that brands go after for advertisements and says, “So, pretty much all brands that we retail are of a certain scale and have a fair bit of distribution in the country. So, reach does become an important factor. If I have to break down the activity and focus on a certain region or certain part of the country, then I would probably be looking at regional influencers. Their crucial health metrics, whether it's engagement, the audience, the followers etc. What would also be really important is the vibe check. It essentially means whether that influencer has been able to match with the brand’s DNA.”

Atique Kazi rounded-up the discussion saying, “So the power of retail and the power of social combined together is superb. I strongly feel that India has seen too many social commerce campaigns or things that have scaled, but it's a space that we all are kind of really watching closely. I feel that the next level of innovation in this space is going to come from India.”