As Facebook continues to grow larger and larger the amount of content that is uploaded to site continues to increase. With more people sharing photos and news stories the visibility of shared deals or purchases could get lost in the shuffle.
According to a study by social commerce platform Shopon clicks on shopping related links shared by other Facebook users have declined by 66% in the last year.
Shopon’s study was conducted by looking at 26,500 shares across multiple catagories.
The study found that it is increasingly tough to get link clicks through shared links, even when the share in genuine and in the person’s own words. Shopon says that clicks on links posted through their platform, which encourages customers to share during the checkout process through incentives, are down from 3.6 percent in May 2011 to 1.2 percent in May 2012.
“Facebook is telling us that more people are going on and sharing product and more people are engaging with their platform. They are, but that doesn’t mean [posts are] going to get more traction… the volume of content going through Facebook has increased exponentially in the past year,” said Shopon Co-Founder Andrew McCarthy.
The ecommerce industry however is hardly the only industry that uses user-generated content to advertise. News reading applications show what friends have read specifics stories. Applications like Spotify let Facebook users know what their friends have been listening to.
The study found that about 4 percent of people will share a purchase after checkout when offered an incentive to do so. The number is based off offering 25,000 people a 15% discount to share their purchase during check out.
The study also found that some categories of deals have a higher propensity of being shared. One example is pet supplies, which had shares from 10 percent of buyers.
The obvious take is that in order to get customers to share an incentive to do so is a necessity. It cannot just be a throw away but must be something worth the effort of sharing and the cost of having what you purchased out in the open.
