Fashion retailer C&A may be a fading brand in much of Europe, but its Brazilian arm is doing what it can to stay on the pulse of social media.
A new initiative called Fashion Like allows people to 'like' certain items of clothing on the company's Facebook page, and these clicks are collated and displayed on the relevant clothes rack in real-time.
Customers are thereby able to view the item's online popularity in the real world to help them make their decision.

via theverge.com

Social Commerce: Fact or Fiction? | Argyle Social is on a mission to help marketers drive meaningful business outcomes through social media marketing. Hundreds of small- and mid-sized businesses rely on our platform to power marketing campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The main points here are:

• Audience size doesn’t always translate into more revenueSmaller brands tend to have bigger audiences and this is due to better communication strategies
• Only 17% of the brands included in the study feature products and 4% have integrate Facebook checkout features
• Brands are not asking for a sale. 49% never include calls to action in messages on Twitter. 44% on Facebook
• Only 29% include special offers/deals on posts (Even though we know most people “Like” brands to get access to them)
• 65% of the brands only share their own content
• 91% do not use premium social media management tools and rely mostly on free solutions

According to the Content Marketing Institute, Content is one of the fastest growing segments in Marketing and an increasing number of marketers are relying more and more on their strategies to achieve success online.

• 90% of marketers are doing some form of Content Marketing, even if they don’t know it (Have you been doing some content marketing without realizing it?)
• 60% of B2B marketers plan on increasing their efforts this year
• 26% of budgets are allocated to content (obviously is much higher in small business)

Infographic courtesy of BlueGlass Interactive.

Here is a great infographic that really highlights the power and potential of social commerce with some great take away stats and insights.

• Social Proof: 81% of customers reach out to friends and family members on social networking sites for advice before purchasing products
• Authority: 77% of online shoppers use reviews to make purchase decisions
• Scarcity: 77% of people like getting exclusive offers that they can redeem via Facebook. We assign more value to products that are less available
• Like: 50% of shoppers have made a purchase based on the recommendation of the people they follow(and like) on social networks. We follow those we like and do the things they do
• Consistency: Purchases made from the brands we trust reinforce our future shopping patterns
• Reciprocity: We have an innate desire to repay favors in order to maintain social fairness, whether those favors are invited or not

Social commerce helps shoppers make smart and savy purchases. In return retailers are able to listen and implement changes in order to provide a tailored product and shopping experience.
Great work from Tab Juice

With an audience of 800 million potential customers, businesses are flocking to Facebook as their go-to social media marketing platform. We examine the who, how, and how much of Facebook marketing.

Ever wonder how much data passes through mobile phones in one minute?

Key Findings:
4,111 Ads tapped
400,710 Ad requests–of those, 140,248 are rich media ad requests
23,148 Apps downloaded in the App Store
$2,340 Ad dollars spent in the U.S.
180 million coins collected on Tiny Zoo Friends
250,000 pieces of fruit sliced on Fruit Ninja
208,333 minutes of Angry Birds played

To download a PDF of this infographic and to view additional infographics in the Mobclix Index, go to blog.mobclix.com/index/

It was a survey of 5,000 European Consumers (of which 1,000 were from the UK) to reveal how consumers interact with brands via email and social medial services.

The results of the survey were released over 3 parts, due to the extensive amount of information gathered, so we thought what better way to summarise the key takeaways than with an eye-catching infographic.

The study is the first of its kind, investigating who is using different social networks and what motivates them to publish and share information. Here, rather than attempting to decide which is the best, most influential or effective marketing channel, marketers need to understand why people are behaving a certain way via social networks and email. This will then allow them to use the most appropriate channel for their campaigns. Parts 1 and 2 looks at consumers and part 3 analysed 500 decision-making marketers.

Here’s the infographic in all its glory.

Microsoft Tag has just released a neat infographic highlighting statistics on how people are using mobile phones in 2011. And a great video that featured late last year with an array of great mobile “growth” statistics, stats and facts for 2011.

The infographic shows that over 1 billion of the worlds 4+ billion mobiles phones are now smartphones, and 3 billion are SMS enabled (weirdly, 950 million mobile phones still don’t have SMS capabilities). In 2014, mobile internet usage will overtake desktop internet usage and already in 2011, more than 50% of all “local” searches are done from a mobile device.

86% of mobile users are watching TV while using a mobile phone, 200+ million (1/3 of all users) access Facebook from a mobile device and 91% of all mobile internet use is “social” related.

A few of the key take outs from the video is that over 70% of the worlds population now have a mobile phone, that’s over 5 billion mobile subscribers, and in places like the US, it’s 9 in 10 people. With children now more likely to own a mobile phone than a book, with 85% of kids owning a phone as to 73% having books! Now that’s a pretty crazy statistic.

Apple has sold almost 60 million iPhones world wide, while Google’s Android OS is growing at 886% year on year and now activating over 160,000 devices a day, across 60 devices in over 40 countries. And at that rate, Android will come from behind to over take Apple as the leading smart phone OS in 2011.

Smartphones are creating smarter shoppers – so how does that affect you? New infographic below to learn about the growth of mobile e-commerce, including how people are shopping on their phones, how many retailers have mobile sites (it's astonishingly small, considering over half of smartphone users would buy something from a mobile site), and which demographic makes purchases on their phones the most. This will be on the test.. Because by 2015, it's predicted that mobile purchases will total $119 billion globally!

Marketers need to understand this Mobile E-commerce (m-commerce) growth in order to plan effective marketing campaigns that reach out to the mobile using audience. Microsoft Tag have put together an infographic detailing how m-commerce operates and how shopping habits are changing.

In the not-so-distant past, media agencies spent a client’s marketing dollars on a standard set of carefully planned options — print newspapers and magazines, radio and television. How quaint. In 2011, TV still reigns at the top of advertising budgets, but online media is on the rise, and it’s transforming the way media agencies plan and measure campaigns. Jump-started by the economic downturn and propelled by changing consumer habits, Internet advertising and social media have captured a growing share of the market and a disproportionate share of the industry buzz and innovation.