Will These Different Social Commerce Metrics Really Help Retailers?

Eventbrite – an online service enabling users to create, share, and join events — has found a way to put a dollar figure on social activity. In 2010, the company issued a post establishing two metrics: visits per share, and dollars per share.

New numbers are out, shining a little bit of light into the nebulous realm of social commerce. Eventbrite is clocking in 14 visits and $4.15 per share on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB); 33 visits and $1.85 per share on Twitter; and 10 visits and $0.92 per share on LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD). Regional numbers vary, with countries like Canada responding more favorably to sharing.

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These numbers reflect a quantitative return on social activity. An additional $4.15 in revenue for every Facebook share is not insignificant to any event organizer. Presumably, there is a cap on revenue return as events sell out. There are also probably diminishing returns on visits per share.

One caveat is that these shares likely have to be organic — the event organizer probably does not get the same return per share as a customer, and especially not if they repeatedly share an event (again, diminishing returns). Still, these numbers do suggest a pretty good reason to incentivize customers to click on that “share this” button after their purchase.

It’s also likely that Eventbrite has particular success in this avenue because of the nature of its service. It is a conduit for social activity, which intuitively responds well to more social activity. It’s not at all unreasonable to let your friends know that you have finally bought tickets to that concert that’s coming to town, and it’s not at all unreasonable for your friends to pile on the bandwagon as they see more and more friends deciding to go.

There are some obvious adopters of this sort of tracking. Users can already share their  Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) purchases, but what reason is there to besides “look at these sweet shoes I just got?” However, as soon as Amazon can quantify the return on a share, it can offer an incentive to the customer. For example, if Amazon gets an average of 10 visits and $2 for every share, they could offer incentives to customers to share their purchases, such as discounts, credits, or points.

Flash and daily deal services like Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) also have a pretty obvious angle for this sort of behavior. Share the fact that you just picked up or redeemed a coupon for a local sale to all your friends, get an additional x-percent off.

The individual companies and retailers that operate through Amazon and Groupon would be the likely champions of this sort of behavior, just as the event managers are the champions of sharing via Eventbrite. As they say, knowledge is power, and accurate return on sharing metrics could help retailers design effective incentives.

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