A recent article by Techcrunch revealed that Facebook Shares are worth nearly three times as much as Tweets when it comes to social commerce. After using both Facebook and Twitter for more than a year, we at Zuupy do not find the statistics surprising, considering that Facebook has the significant advantage of leveraging on our real-life social graph to empower our purchases while Twitter merely relies on our interest graph. Alas, for Twitter, we are still more likely to trust a friend than an industrial expert or celebrity.

One implication of these findings is that Tweets will be perceived as less valuable as social currency. The reason is pretty obvious: the Twitter experience is horrid. First, for professional networking, Twitter generally comprises a body of self-serving broadcasters who are constantly pushing out content of their own and increase their follower count without any intention whatsoever to engage with their followers. Second, the text-only, 140-character nature of Twitter lost its novelty after a while, and, despite recent attempts to support multimedia from Twitter.com itself, it is still a slow and cumbersome process to consume content on Twitter. Even the infamous one-liner updates achieved via Facebook Likes monetize better than Tweets.

The lesson for us is clear: focus on Facebook first, and then explore Twitter. Google recently announced its social search feature, which, although more focused on Twitter than Facebook (Facebook profiles are not crawlable after all), underscores the importance of the social graph in empowering search results. In general, especially with consumers, “Facebook is the people you went to high school with. Twitter is the people you wish you went to high school with.”

Also, with recent studies showing that Facebook social commerce is really about deals and not engagement, the lesson for us is perhaps to focus on Facebook and deals simultaneously. Indeed, the launch of our latest competitor, CrowdBunny, provides testament to the opportunities available in the area of Facebook group buying. We have launched a couple of months before them, and we are just excited to see some validation in terms of competitors entering the space. We see social commerce as focusing on Facebook and group deals in the near future, as evidenced by our Facebook group buying solution. What do you think social commerce will look like in the near future?

Consumers are not idiots. Let that sink in. When Kanye West and Jay-Z decided to release a new song on Facebook, making access to that song contingent upon liking the song release page, one would think that they would be able to convert a few million of their 11 million existing Facebook fans into liking the new page. It turns out that consumers are no longer that easy to persuade, given that only 80,000 fans actually clicked Like. That, needless to say, is an abysmal hit rate.

A large part of Facebook marketing these days centers around encouraging consumers to share content through a variety of means, from blatantly asking them to share (“share it with your friends if you find it useful/funny”) to meticulously engineering viral loops that sound so good in theory that, if they worked, every employee of that business would be retiring by the next week in Bermuda. Consumers recognize a viral loop when they see one (really), so any overt attempt at making them play along with marketing shenanigans would naturally make the business look desperate and the brand less desirable.

A viral marketing strategy that is increasingly popular is the hostage strategy: if you want X, do Y first. This strategy is possibly the result of countless futile attempts at asking consumers nicely to share things, and, though more and more brands are adopting this approach, it remains unknown if this sort of free marketing actually produces returns. We ourselves use the hostage strategy in building our marketing app, and we have also recently experimented with the game mechanics strategy, i.e. making sharing fun and interactive.

At the end of the day, however, it may be best to revert to a no-nonsense plea to share, once consumers get tired of hostage situations and silly games. What do you think?

Social media sharing was simple back then. It works on a consume-first-share-later model: content providers gave out content for free, and consumers shared said content, if they deemed it worthy of sharing. These days, there seems to be another increasingly popular model, what we call the share-first-consume-later model. Facebook Likes and even tweets are now increasingly used as de facto currency on some content platforms.

In fact, this model is becoming mainstream. TechCrunch recently instituted tweets as a way for their readers to participate in a contest. Effectively, readers are offering tweets as a bribe to gain access to the contest, with TechCrunch merely giving an invitation to treat. Of course, legal technicalities aside, this is a model to which we subscribe, for we also make consumers click on Facebook Like buttons to participate in deals.

The other way of seeing it is that it is the businesses who are bribing consumers with valuable things to get them to Like something, a view adopted by author Nicholas Carr. In illustrating the absurdity of the social media bribery model with a personal analogy, he said, “Back in elementary school, there was this distinctly unlikable kid who, if you agreed to act like his friend for a day, would let you swim in his family's swimming pool.” Perhaps we can all read about his petty musings here and see if he knows what he is talking about.

The original purpose of Facebook Likes and Tweets is, expressly, to share and, impliedly, to show endorsement. Over time, these social media sharing tools have gradually evolved in their application to – in addition to their original purpose – serve as a form of currency for social media marketing. The implication of this shift is that consumers begin to treat sharing things on social media as something not to be given up so easily, particularly when it comes to products and services, or, equally possible, as something to be given up more easily than normal to achieve certain limited ends.

There are several models that use Facebook Likes or Tweets as currency; the Pay with a Tweet model allows consumers to purchase items by “paying” for it via a promotional effort, while Facebook-based deals applications, such as Sears’ WishTogether and Walmart’s CrowdSaver, adopt a Groupon-like model that delivers deals upon the achievement of certain Like thresholds for said deals. Of course, when social media sharing is treated as a medium of trade, the average endorsement value of social media sharing goes down, since the sharer is most likely sharing for a non-endorsement purpose.

It remains to be seen if Likes and Tweets can serve as a viable currency in exchange for goods, services, deals, etc. What is predictable is that social media sharing – especially with regard to ecommerce – will increase in quantity, but decrease in quality, as more people will share for selfish reasons and thus suppress signal-to-noise ratio, arguably one of the most important yardsticks for any social media platform.