Digital River Lets Ecommerce Stores Capture Social Media Metrics By Vangie Beal

For many small business ecommerce sites, using a full-ecommerce service provider has its benefits. Most notably it allows the e-store owner to focus on the tasks required to run the business and spend less time involved with the technology needed to manage the online store.

As ecommerce trends come and go, small business ecommerce sites using a hosted storefront can often jump on the new trends -- like mobile commerce and social commerce -- quickly because most vendors update services to incorporate new trends and ecommerce features.  One area that is growing is social commerce and online store owners are looking for ways to incorporate social media and to leverage social media to make or increase revenue.

Digital River SocialStream Offers Social Media Campaigns and Metrics

Digital River (NASDAQ: DRIV), a global ecommerce service provider, is one company that recently announced a new social media tool for its global ecommerce platform. Called SocialStream, the new social media tool lets Digital River customers quickly launch and manage e-store promotions over multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts.  

Also -- a very important feature -- is that SocialStream gives e-store owners the capability to capture social sales metrics. This social media tool release comes at a time when many small business ecommerce site owners are still trying to figure out how to tap in to social media analytics to discover the potential ROI of social commerce.

Making the Social Connection with SocialStream

In an interview with Ecommerce-Guide.com, Jim Wehmann, senior vice president of global marketing for Digital River said that Social Stream lets marketers and e-store owners optimize social media campaigns with just a few clicks from within the standard Digital River interface they already know and use.

"SocialStream is integrated right into the Digital River workflow," he said. "Marketers can decide to post promotions or features to Facebook and Twitter by making a simple action to send those messages out around the tasks they are already working on.”

For example, this could be creating a “preview” type promotion for new software or for a special deal in your e-store.  As you set the campaign you can send it out across the social media platforms in addition to your own e-store and other marketing channels you use -- right from where you are working in the Digital River interface.

E-store owners also do not need to do much to use this feature.  Wehmann said that due to some legal issues with connecting to third-party or external sites, customers will need to agree to a change in the Terms of Service to access SocialStream, but after that they simply need to connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts and it is immediately available.

Capturing the ROI of Social Sales

While Digital River is certainly not the first ecommerce platform provider to offer some sort of social media functionality for its customers, one big benefit with the SocialStream offering is that e-store owners  will also have access to social analytics as part of the deal.

Some small business ecommerce sites using social media are stuck as there is no clear way to go from traditional Web analytics to social media analytics with the ecommerce tools and services they use. For the most part, many use standard Web analytics to see site traffic and pageviews or click-through rates that come to the ecommerce website from Facebook or Twitter as the referring source. 

While this can give you a good indication of how important these social media sites are to your e-store and your small business ecommerce site, it doesn’t capture your real social media metrics or help you determine your own social media marketing ROI (return on investment).

The reports offered in SocialStream let you see the commerce actions that have come directly through the supported social media platforms. Expanding on this, Wehmann said that Digital River SocialStream generates campaign reports that show metrics for actual social media customer activities. SocialStream can track unique clicks, conversions and revenue generated for each social campaign for each of your social accounts.

When you have reporting tools to track metrics like average order value, revenue per visitor, revenue generated per follower, and click through -- an ecommerce site owner can then see which social media campaigns are converting and see the real return and sales generated thorough each social media marketing opportunity.

For its ecommerce customers, Digital River has rolled out SocialStream into two of its ecommerce platforms; the fully-managed ecommerce solution, Global Ecommerce, and also in its self-managed solution, Commerce Express.