Social media management will be high on the list of priorities for SMEs and large companies in 2020 as 75% are expecting to increase investments in marketing across social platforms during the next 12 months, according to a new report from Slickdeals.

The ‘Embracing Social Commerce: Strategies, Successes, and Future Investments among Retailers’ study found that social media is now a prime battleground for engaging with customers and driving sales.

The rise of social and its collective billion-strong audience has also turned online shopping on its head, creating a new dynamic where many brands can drive as much commerce on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms as standard e-commerce websites.

Social commerce was just a fledgling concept five years ago, but it has since evolved into a vast and varied network, allowing brands to publish content and deliver experiences that support the online selling of products and services.

The use of social networks to push e-commerce transactions has become so important that three quarters of brands will be looking to spend more on social media marketing during the first year of the new decade.

Social commerce is widely practiced, with 89% of respondents in the survey saying that they are already utilising it or are expecting to do so within the next two years.

High-quality content should be at the core of customer engagement, but actually getting a meaningful strategy together remains a challenge for companies.

More than four in 10 said that their biggest struggle is developing and enacting a social strategy.

Meanwhile, 38% want to build a reputation centred around trust and loyalty to attract and retain the interest of consumers, which often involves using content to build on emotional bonds established during previous interactions and transactions.

Companies often use the metric ‘attribution’ to measure the value of engagement on social media as this allows them to see who has signed up for a newsletter or made a purchase.

First-click attribution gives full credit to the very first interaction regardless of the journey afterwards, while the inverse is true for last-click attribution.

The study found that 33% of respondents assign to the first click and 34% to the last-click.

Slickdeals’ senior VP Tom Straszewski says: “We see that those who invest more heavily in social commerce tend to look more at first click versus last click attribution, given that a consumer’s first click represents the beginning of their overall engagement with a brand and, thereby, the most meaningful step in the customer journey.”

As the new year begins, Forbes believes that social media has shortened attention spans and expects “snippety visuals” to be among the best forms of content for communication during the coming months.

Social will be an excellent outlet for these shorter, bite-sized forms of content, which can complement longer, editorial blogs and articles on corporate websites.

Forbes says that hitting the “sweet spot” in terms of audience attention will be crucial in 2020 as dynamic customers find new ways to consume content and interact with their favourite brands.