Digital 2022: Social Commerce Takes Off
Social commerce is one of the hottest topics in marketing and retail at the moment, and all the latest trends point to more growth and bigger opportunities in 2022.
To help make sense of this exciting new opportunity, we’ve included figures for ad reach on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shop in our new Digital 2022 Global Overview Report.
Note that these figures only represent the number of users that marketers can reach with ads in these environments; they don’t offer any insights into how many users are actually making purchases via these environments, nor do they necessarily represent the full extent of each environment’s total active user base.
Indeed, Meta reports that more than 1 billion Facebook users access Marketplace each month, so there seems to be quite a big gap between total Marketplace users, and the share of those users that actually sees ads within Facebook’s commerce environment.
However, this gap exists across other Meta products too, and our analysis suggests that Facebook’s overall ad reach only equates to 72.5 percent of the platform’s total monthly active user figure [find some potential explanations here].
Furthermore, these ad audience figures still tell a compelling story, and further demonstrate that social commerce is gaining rapid momentum.
Overall, Meta’s latest data reveals that more than 725 million users now see ads across its platforms’ dedicated social commerce offerings each month, but adoption and audience demographics vary by platform.
Facebook Marketplace
Ads in Facebook Marketplace now reach more than 560 million users each month, equating to more than a quarter of the platform’s total ad reach.
In line with overall platform demographics, Facebook Marketplace attracts a larger male audience, with men accounting for 55 percent of the Marketplace audience.
However, the more interesting finding is that the Marketplace audience tends to be considerably older than the Facebook audience as a whole.
Users over the age of 35 account for more than half (50.9 percent) of Marketplace’s global ad audience, yet they account for just 40.9 percent of Facebook’s overall ad audience.
Note that Facebook limits use of Marketplace to users aged 18 and above, which explains why figures in the lowest age bracket are so low.
Instagram Shop
Instagram Shop has also started to gain momentum, with the company’s tools reporting that advertisers can now reach more than 187 million users with ads in the Shop tab.
However, in contrast to our findings for Facebook Marketplace, the data indicate that women account for a much greater share of Instagram Shop’s global ad audience.
Moreover, the fact that 58 percent of Shop’s global audience is female is particularly significant given the relatively balanced gender ratio we see across Instagram’s audience as a whole.
If you’d like to dig even deeper into the latest stats and trends for social commerce, be sure to check out Shopify’s excellent new Future of Commerce reports, which our Global Digital Reports team also contributed to.
Looking for a complete picture of digital behaviours in 2022? Check out our full Digital 2022 Global Overview Report by clicking here.
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