Leading retail brands use Facebook wishlist apps to drive online sales

Multiple brands have found wishlist Facebook apps particularly effective and have employed it every year since for the festive season. Brands such as Digital.co.za/project/woolworths-facebook-project/ Woolworths and Digital.co.za/project/exclusives-wishlist-app-2012/ Exclusive Books have launched multiple successful wishlist campaigns.

Digital.co.za/ Realm Digital, a leading design and development agency, developed wishlist apps for both Woolworths and Exclusive Books. Simon Bestbier, Account Director at Realm Digital, commented, "Online retail has seen an acceleration in growth over the last year and social wishlisting apps have enabled brands to promote their products to a large, focused market with effective passive marketing."

What is a wishlist Facebook app and why build it?

Retailers are using Facebook apps to drum up the spirit of Christmas, by building apps that allow the consumer to create their own wishlist of products from their online store. Consumers are always willing to participate, as it means they can build their own Christmas wishlist and share it with friends and family on Facebook. Many retailers incentivise this one step further by adding a competition element where consumers could win their entire wishlist.

Many brands use the Facebook wishlist app to increase engagement on their company Facebook page, as users have to 'like' the page in order to create a wishlist.

What this results in is increased traffic to their website as users are given a choice to purchase the product on their e-commerce site, it also results in a site-wide boost for sales, and extra brand awareness at the most pivotal time of year for any retailer.

The wishlist Facebook app can be a handy tool for retailers to launch new products, or to promote certain items by displaying the most popular wishlist selections. It is proven that consumers still prefer word-of-mouth confirmation more than any other type of marketing, and where better to allow products to speak for themselves than on Facebook?

A new kind of word-of-mouth marketing

Essentially what social wishlisting does is allow users to create customised advertising for the e-commerce site in the form of hinting, and passively sharing it to their social network on Facebook. Other users are actively engaged when browsing their friends' profile, which results in a more effective type of marketing than banner ads for example, which over time become invisible to users.