Navigating the evolving world of social commerce: NMF day 1
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Northern Marketing Festival
At Embryo, we’re extremely proud to be the headline sponsor for Prolific North’s Northern Marketing Festival 2025. Prolific North are the northern cornerstone for all things marketing, media and tech, and their annual marketing festival is a fantastic opportunity for new and existing members to learn new skills and make new connections. This year, I had the honour of being a speaker for the festival’s opening day in Liverpool.
Sharing the stage with Novaro founder, Chris Grimes, we delved into how to navigate the world of social commerce and turn scrolls into sales. Our talk covered the types of social content that drive sales, from live videos to UGC and ad-specific formats, and how to succeed in a space that is getting increasingly crowded.
Put simply, social commerce is buying and selling goods directly within a social media platform, and it’s on the rise. In fact, the UK’s social commerce market is expected to grow by 26.6% annually.
Social commerce and standard social ecommerce selling differ in that you don’t need to leave the social media platform to check out. Usually, a user will click on a social ad and navigate to the brand’s website to purchase that product. With social commerce, the user can check out within the social platform and then continue scrolling through their feed, with some processes being in as few as 2 clicks.
The most notable social commerce feature currently available in the UK is TikTok Shop. TikTok Shop has been around for a few years now, but has recently started taking off in the UK and Europe, with over 200,000 active businesses on TikTok Shop in the UK in 2024.
Both social commerce and e-commerce have their use cases. For products or services that have a longer consideration phase and conversion window, such as high AOV products that require research, think sofas and large furniture, you’re less likely to want to check out so quickly. With this in mind, we’ve looked at both sides of the coin – what social content drives social commerce sales, and what drives social ecommerce sales?
Social media is developing new content types every day – with keeping users on the platform and allowing advertisers to make money at the forefront. There are four main streams of content: organic posts, affiliate posts, lives, and ads. These four content streams can sit into three buckets: social commerce, social ecommerce, and a mixture of both.
Social commerce content
Shoppable videos
Shoppable videos are perhaps the content type that you would think of first when considering how to drive sales through social media. Shoppable videos allow creators on TikTok to add products to their videos. When a product is tagged in a shoppable video, the link takes the user directly to that product page on TikTok shop, where the user can then checkout within 2 clicks. This type of social content is perfect for brands with products that you can clearly demonstrate – such as beauty products, small kitchen appliances etc.
Top tips for creating shoppable content:
- Showcase your products in real-life scenarios – what problems does it solve and how can you get that across to your audience
- Incorporate storytelling to connect emotionally with your audience
- Use strong visual, spoken and text hooks
- Employ AI tools to generate engaging product descriptions quickly
Live videos
Live Shopping is a commerce phenomenon that has had the world in its grasp for many years. The initial iterations come from the QVC shopping channel – that peaked in the late 90s and early 2000s – where viewers would see live demonstrations of products and phone up to make a purchase. The premise stays the same in 2025, but has been made even simpler.
TikTok Live Shopping allows brands to host a live streaming session, showcasing their products and giving viewers the opportunity to ask questions and find out more details. But, creators can pin product cards to the bottom of their streams to guide users to purchase in-app. This feature is proving extremely successful – more than 50% of TikTok users have purchased a product from a livestream in-app.
Top tips for creating lives that sell:
- Leverage real-time engagement
- Showcase products effectively
- Utilise TikTok’s live shopping features
- Collaborate with influencers
- Promote and pre-heat your live sessions
- Plan your content ahead of time
- Analyse performance metrics
Affiliate
Affiliate content on TikTok is a rising form of social commerce. Affiliate partnerships on the platform allow brands to work with creators who post content about their products, with a shoppable link. When users engage with the content and click the link, and then purchase, the creator gets a percentage of the sale as commission. This partnership can be established through an agency or network, or with the individual affiliate themselves.
Utilising affiliates allows you to amplify your content reach and play into the fact that people buy from people.
Top tips for successful affiliates on TikTok:
- Do your research – find the right affiliates for your brand
- Have your strategy and goals laid out before you start
- Content authenticity is key
- Lean into trends, but be careful of them ageing your content
Social ecommerce content
Catalogue ads
Catalogue ads are the bread and butter of driving ecommerce sales through paid social, but mainly feature on Meta (they are also available on TikTok and Pinterest but aren’t as widely used). Catalogue ads link up to your website product feed and pull through products into carousels, single image ads or collections. The core product information – product title, price, image, description – all pull through automatically and update as soon as they update on your website. Catalogue ads are extremely practical in the stock levels also update automatically – meaning that the product will not feature in ads if it is out of stock.
You tend to see catalogue ads in retargeting campaigns, particularly abandoned basket campaigns, and for brands with huge product ranges and high stock, such as ASOS.
Top tips for driving sales with catalogue ads:
- Catalogue ads don’t need to be boring – add an intro card or frames to inject some creativity into them
- Collection ads are a creative way to use your catalogue feed if you don’t have the strongest SKU images as you can be more creative with the main image
- Create product sets that make sense for users so you aren’t just showing every single product that you have – e.g. garden product set, DIY product set, BBQs product set
Video ads
Video is extremely important across all social media platforms, and ads are no exception. Naturally, TikTok Ads sit predominantly with with video ads as their primary ad format, but Meta and Pinterest area also placing huge emphasis on pushing good video content. Video ads can be used with pretty much any objectives, but are particularly effective higher up the funnel.
With all social platforms, video ads can be a good way to blend into the organic feed with engaging content that don’t appear very sales heavy.
Top tips for driving sales with video ads:
- Video doesn’t have to be complicated – static imagery run together in a slideshow style can work if you’re in a pinch
- Make sure that your creative is tailored to different placements – portrait for story is the one that sometimes gets forgotten
- Use hooks and get into the content within the first 3 seconds
Carousel ads
If you’re looking to tell a story – carousel ads are the way to go. Carousel ads are effectively standard static image ads but you can use up to 10 in one go that users can swipe through continually.
By having multiple image slides, advertisers can really showcase multiple aspects of their brand or products. This allows brands to tell a story most effectively – one of the core elements of driving sales with creative on social media.
Carousel ads can be useful at the top or bottom of the funnel, driving instant engagement by nudging the user to swipe.
Top tips for driving sales with carousel ads:
- Why would someone care enough to keep reading? Make sure your first slide is engaging
- Tailor your content to the placements available – carousel ads on story placement look completely different if they don’t have the correct dimensions!
- You don’t need your branding on every single one, save that space for something more important
Content that does both
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is fast becoming the favoured way to drive sales on social media, whether through ads or TikTok shop. UGC is content that is created by users, customer and reviewers. The reason that this content has become so popular is because it appears extremely genuine, relatable and trustworthy. UGC is like golddust to retail brands, as it’s a modern version of word-of-mouth marketing. That being said, it’s not always that easy to get hold of, particularly if you’re a small or startup business.
With that in mind, a lot of brands tend to lean into a fake-UGC angle – staging content to appear like UGC with creators or actors – or head down a different avenue and run with founder-generated content (FGC).
UGC can be used across both paid social ads to drive ecommerce sales, but is also extremely valuable in social commerce based campaigns. For ecommerce, UGC content can be used in video ads, with ad clicks sending the user to relevant category or product pages to convert. For social commerce, UGC content can be turned into shoppable videos to drive instant product page clicks.
Top tips for driving sales with UGC:
- The more authentic the better
- Personality can resonate with users, don’t be afraid to use UGC because it doesn’t necessarily fit your brand TOV
- If you’re outreaching for UGC, focus on good content creators instead of notable influencers
Organic content
Organic content is posted without any paid budget behind it on social media. This type of content doesn’t necessarily have the aim of driving sales, as it is extremely difficult to grow your organic following and reach. However, because organic content tends to be less sales-focused, it can actually do the complete opposite and drive more sales. That is because it comes across as a lot more genuine and relatable.
Organic content can be quick to put together as it doesn’t necessarily have to be as polished as other content types, and can therefore be more accessible.
Organic content can be utilised in paid social campaigns – boosted posts/Spark ads – with advertisers adding a product/category link to the post. We’ve seen a lot of success with these campaigns at Embryo, driving success across many ecom clients. Organic content can also be vital in driving social commerce sales as it can be used as shoppable content that links directly to your TikTok product page.
Top tips for driving sales with organic content:
- Embrace authentic storytelling
- Leverage trending sounds, hashtags, memes and trending content styles
- Engage consistently with your audience
- Collaborate with influencers and creators
- Optimise content for the ‘For You’ page
- Analyse performance and iterate
Social commerce is all about understanding your audience and creating content that resonates with them enough that they purchase your product. Outside of the specifics mentioned above, there are a few core elements that help you drive sales through social commerce and ecommerce alike:
- Problem and solution – the best content understands the problems of the target audience and provides a clear solution in their product
- Always on is the best way to drive growth – it isn’t sufficient to purely focus on your social creative efforts during peak periods, by having an “always on” approach you can drive consistent results
- Human creativity + AI efficiency – AI is only getting better and leveraging AI’s efficiency tools can support the human creativity required to drive results
