Differences Between Social Media And Social Commerce

Since its emergence in the last decade, social media has rapidly moved from a purely socializing tool to a key professional application (Cummings et al., 2009). Social media and social networks use in commerce has become ubiquitous and are changing the way we communicate, market, sell, and trade (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). The popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) and the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies have brought new developments to e-commerce, which enable individuals to join and interact with their peers on online communities via social platforms (Liang & Turban, 2011). The social connections and interactions of individuals on the Internet, especially in SNSs, have developed e-commerce to social commerce (Zeng et al., 2009).

Social

Firstly, social commerce mainly focuses on social activities such as sharing, networking and collaborating, while e-commerce, on the other hand, focuses on providing advanced search or product recommendations to maximize shopping efficiency (Huang & Benyoucef, 2013). Secondly, social commerce allows real-time interaction so that customers can use the content generated by other customers, not just information from the companies. This way increases customer control and reduces the distance between customers and companies (Constantinides & Fountain, 2008). However, with e-commerce websites, customers have little or no control over the websites. The companies who own the websites control the messages and information exchanges (Huang & Benyoucef, 2013). Finally, regarding system interaction, social commerce offers a more social, interactive, and collaborative online experience, whereas e-commerce provides merely one-way browsing; that is, information from customers is rarely sent back to businesses, which can be later used to support customers' problem solving and decision making (Huang et al., 2012). Most importantly, social media actually enhance the networked value creation by customers because the collective outcomes produced from online customers are usually better (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).

Social media and social

Social commerce, as we position, is the intersecting center of these circles. From our observation it seems that most studies fall into the three big circles – People, Technology, followed by Business. Studies focusing on Information are relatively fewer but appear to emerge in recent years. What is missing in the literature, however, is the lack of an understanding of the dynamic iterative nature of these components through recursive use over time. In addition, research on Government 2.0 or digital era government and social media is still scarce in the literature base. Given that digital governments are increasingly embracing social media applications such as Facebook pages, twitter updates, YouTube videos, and blogs for the influx of large amounts of data about digital interactions (Mergel, 2013) to foster customer relationships as commonly seen within social commerce, future research is encouraged to focus on this