The next generation Social Media Webshops are here!

Today we´re seeing a major step being taken in webshopping as we know it. For a while there´s been buzz around social media webshops, and the Finnish company Vuole with their social media webshop platform Savalanche has been one of the forerunners in this field. They have been actively setting up new webshops for various types of companies and products ranging from CDs to Mac computers, and such interesting Facebook webshops as e.g. Aanmaa handicraft and Miasma, and blogs like Pastanjauhantaa have been top-notch showcases for the company. At the same time there has been interesting development of very different kind. Another Finnish company named Thinglink came up with an idea about tagging photos with links of various sorts. One can not just tag a photo or an item or an individual in a photo, but insert weblinks to photographs - so called in-image links. Now, I don´t mean including a link in a photograph, but almost any amount of links with different addresses. They recently added audiolinks to photos as well, with audio player link coming from SoundCloud, but that wasn´t the end of development, far from it.

Think about adding your wedding song to your wedding photo, with additional links to Flickr where all your wedding pictures are stored, another link in that same photo leading to your personal blog, one link to the shop you bought your wedding dress from, etc. The possibilities are plenty. And not just photos, any images, and not just music, but any audio. Only thing missing from a full memory is the smell, right? How did her perfume smell that night?

What about the news of the day then?!

Today´s hot topic is the 2 companies - Vuole and Thinglink - joining forces in building a new type of Social Media Webshopping Platform, where a photograph (anywhere online), is a webshop of its own, sort of. When you have a blog or a fan page at Facebook, and you have photos there, you could now build links to photos leading directly to a Savalanche webshop – talkin´bout making buying easy. In the web, the more clicks you need to make, the less propable it is a sale will take place. So having a direct link from a photo where one sees an interesting item, to the webshop product page where it can directly be bought, is a game-changer! And what´s even better, the webshop is absolutely free to install.

Those of you who have been dealing with social media more than just for entertainment purposes, may know the statistics telling us about how the strength of social sales is in recommendations. What this new solution enables, is that you could become a webshopkeeper through your blog in a new and exciting way, linking all the items in the photographs at your blogpages directly to a webshop where your readers can buy the products you recommended or reviewed. And! There´s more. You may also become an affiliate marketer of sort, as you may earn commission on the products that are bought by people coming to someone else's webshop through that photo-link you had. You kind of host the shop at your blog while never owning the products. Nice, ´eh?

This all is great, isn´t it, but there´s still more to it. Thinglink has also made a deal with Amazon recently, so that when you tag an item in your image with a link to Amazon, you may also earn money through the Amazon Associate program. This has nothing to do with Savalanche, but again a new possibility for those affiliate marketers out there (NomadCouch, are you listening?). Tagging the images themselves is easy, the last post where I tried it myself, was done in mere minutes...

Here below are the first in-link images from the first live blog in relation to this, they just went live with these pictures. The first webshop providers opening their shops for these images and links are Finnish Design Shop, Valleys, Tia Arkko Design and Aurorahelmi, possibly some others as well.

I´ll be coming up with more details about Thinglink soon, keep checking in!