SmartBlogs on Social Media

This Spotlight on Social Commerce series is brought to you by Bazaarvoice, bringing the power of social commerce to the world’s best brands. Once a month, this blog will focus on the tactics, best practices and trends on the intersection of social media and commerce.

Levi’s integrated Facebook functionality into its online Friends Store, allowing shoppers to see the styles their friends were most interested in — and make a few recommendations of their own. I asked Levi’s Director of Digital and Social Marketing Megan O’Connor to tell me more about how Levi’s is working social media into its online sales strategy.

How and why did Levi’s decide to integrate Facebook into its online Friends Store?

As a company that was founded by a pioneer, we want to continue to innovate around how to shop for jeans. Our goal was to create a customized social-shopping experience that will make buying jeans online more fun. We know that many of our shoppers are actively using social-media sites to connect with their friends and family. We wanted to extend this same idea to shopping online by providing fun and innovative ways to improve the shopping experience: helping them find popular styles and getting recommendation on fits from their friends.

The integration with Facebook also allows our passionate ambassadors to find and share information about their favorite Levi’s products. We’re empowering the people who love our clothes to connect with our brand, find our products and share their experiences with friends.

From your perspective, what’s the difference between selling apparel online and selling in Web 2.0 environment? Was it just a matter of updating the website, or did you need to change your sales strategy, too?

This new innovation makes online shopping interactive in a totally new way. By integrating www.Levi.com with Facebook, our shoppers can get advice from their friends on a specific product and browse their favorites. You have a different level of trust when you know your friend loves a product. And we find this interaction is especially important for people shopping for jeans online, as “fit” is so important. And by getting this type of real-time feedback from our consumers, we will change our sales strategies to meet their needs.

What’s the relationship between clicking the “Like” button on a pair of jeans in the Friends Store and purchasing? Are people who Like a pair of jeans more likely to buy than other visitors to your online store?

We are allowing our best customers to share their favorite products with their friends. We believe if we are a loved a brand and we enable fun and interactive ways of shopping, sales will follow.

What about the friends of users who Liked a pair of Levi’s? What kind of engagement have you seen from them?

We’ve already seen great reaction from our consumers to the “Like” button. As of right now, over 60,000 Levi’s products have been “liked” on www.Levi.com. We’ve also see an increase in the number of people who “like” the Levi’s brand on Facebook — up to 2 million in the past six months alone. We couldn’t be more excited about how engaged our shoppers are with our brand.

What has the Friends Store taught you about your customers and their tastes? How does something like the Friends Store compare to doing traditional market research?

The integration of Facebook with our e-commerce site gives us real-time feedback about what products consumers are responding to, something traditional market research isn’t able to do. Though our integration with social media on Levi.com is still relatively new, we can absolutely imagine a world in which we’ll make product decisions based on what styles are being liked on the site — and the feedback from users will impact future lines.

Image credit: Henrik5000, iStockPhoto