Intro
Social media has changed. It’s not only a place to connect. But to entertain and be entertained. To search, to learn and to shop. 50% of Gen Z spend more than 4 hours per day on social. And as of 2025, there are more social network users than linear TV viewers:
This shift in consumer behavior has also started social commerce, a booming industry allowing businesses to make billions of dollars through social media channels.
But it’s also become more challenging and complex, with more social platforms, more content formats, more creator niches and more tactics.
Brands who figured out how to make their social media funnel work are turning casual scrollers into customers. And you can too if you understand how a social funnel works.
What's a Social Funnel in Ecommerce?
Imagine this: You’re scrolling through Instagram, and you see an ad for a product you’ve never heard of. You click on it, watch a video, visit their website, and you move on.
The next day, you see your favorite creator speaking about the brand. You check the brand’s Instagram account, their website again, and decide to buy. That journey? That’s a social media marketing funnel in action.
In simple terms, a social funnel is a step-by-step process that turns strangers on social media into paying customers. It’s like a roadmap that guides people from discovering your brand to buying from it, and even coming back for more.
Difference to Traditional Marketing Funnels
Traditional funnel is a linear, intent-driven process where users search for products with a buying intention, often through SEO, paid search, or direct website visits.
Traditionally, markets assume that consumers go through different stages before making a purchase. From discovery to consideration to conversion to loyalty, there are multiple touch points and metrics to track:
In contrast, the social funnel isn’t a straight line. It’s messy, unpredictable, and often loops back on itself. Customers might discover your brand on Instagram, research it on TikTok, visit your Shopify store, and finally buy it after seeing a retargeting ad on Meta.
That’s why creating content and shopping experiences relevant to the specific context is key. It helps you meet customers where they are, no matter how unpredictable their journey might be.
A social funnel takes advantage of social media platforms’ unique features, like:
- Instagram Reels and TikTok videos to grab attention with short, engaging content.
- Meta ads to retarget interested shoppers and keep your brand top of mind.
- In-platform shopping like TikTok Shop to make buying as easy as a tap—without ever leaving the app.
- X/Twitter posts for meme based marketing and to spark conversations.
In short, a social funnel meets your customers where they already are—scrolling, liking, sharing, and shopping on social media.
Next, we’ll break down the key stages of a social funnel and share actionable tactics to optimize each stage for maximum conversions. Let’s dive in!
Key Stages of a Social Funnel
To simplify, let’s break the social funnel into 3 key stages:
1. Awareness
At this top funnel stage, your goal is simple: Grab their attention. Consumers are not familiar with your brand. Or with the problem that you're solving. Or they might be aware of the product, but not about the way your product solves it. And your goal is to provide them with information that helps make a decision.
On social, sponsored influencer posts and platform ads are the main awareness drivers. Let’s look how Wild—a UK refillable deodorant brand bought by Unilever in 2025—is generating awareness via paid social and influencers.
Wild has reached an impressive scale and diversity on Meta, with 450 live ads running in Mar 2025 with a strong mix of UGC video, influencer video and statics targeting new customers:
According to Storyclash, Wild had 1.3k mentions from collaborating creators on Instagram in 2025. Wild is focusing on creators across sizes (micro, mid tier, macro) and content niches:
More and more brands are blending influencer and paid social with whitelisting. Whitelisting means getting the distribution rights for the influencer content and playing out the content via the influencer account. This approach adds social proof to your ads, and can significantly reduce your customer acquisition costs.
With the transition for a follower based fees to an interest based open feeds, organic content can also be used to generate awareness. The key for successful organic content is authentic storytelling, and increasingly "unhinged" content best executed by Duolingo.
Another common tactic we still observe are sweepstakes and giveaways:
The “like, comment, share” playbook still works and can drive organic content to new audiences, if executed creatively and in a measured way for your community.
The key here is demand generation. You’re not just reaching people—you’re sparking interest. Your ads and content should feel native to the platform, high-quality, and aligned with your brand’s core message.
Remember: At the top of the funnel, your audience has little to no awareness of your brand. Your job is to change that. Make them curious. Make them want to know more.
2. Consideration & Conversion
This is where you turn interest into conversions.
They know who you are. They’ve seen your content, maybe even liked a post or two. But now comes the hard part: convincing them to buy.
If you find it helpful, you might want to differentiate between “Middle of Funnel (MOFU)” and “Bottom of Funnel (TOFU)”.
At mid funnel, customers might have visited your website longer than x days ago, and you want to provide additional social proof, or a new angle to your product's benefits. Ads targeted at audiences with previous touch points (retargeting) are a great tool for mid funnel campaigns:
In bottom funnel, customers are ready to buy, but might be waiting for a deal - and you can identify those via abandoned cart or similar events. Promotion or catalogue ads are a great tool for BOFU campaigns:
In addition, you can leverage micro-stores or your customers with affiliate programs to incentive them to promote your products:
Lastly, you can leverage in-platform shopping features (TikTok Shop), paired with ads and a creator affiliate program, in order to make it easy to buy your products without leaving the platform:
At this stage, it’s about making it stupidly easy for customers to say “yes.”Here’s the key: If you don’t make this process seamless, you’ll lose them.
You got the customer, now it’s about building a long term relationship.
4. Retention
Here is where you're making your business sustainable. You’ve spent time, energy, and money to acquire a customer. Now, it’s time to keep them.
Your existing customers are your best customers. They already know you. They already trust you. And they’re far more likely to buy from you again.
Outside of social, CRM is your best friend here. But besides CRM tactics, what social tools do you have?
Community
The strongest brands manage to build communities. PetLab Co has a 123k member Facebook community, HOLY runs a 40k member community on Discord, and many more brands are running active communities on Facebook (yes Facebook) and Instagram.
For special promotions, community first brands like HOLY even lock their main store and redirect to their Discord community to create additional hype around a new product launch.
Communities only work if your customers are seeking to interact with fellow fans. So it works best for products promoting a certain lifestyle or interests (pet owners, gaming, fitness, nutrition).
Plus you need someone who can moderate this community, and actually enjoys doing it. If you don’t meet these criteria, building and managing a community might not be the best spend for your resources.
Loyalty & Referral Programs
Very few brands get this right. And most brands launch loyalty & referral programs too early and without commitment. So it’s not a surprise that most loyalty & referral programs fizzle out or contribute in a non meaningful way to your brand’s success.
The ones that get this right manage to (a) build an initial foundation of loyal customers BEFORE launching the program, (b) create generous incentives that make it worth joining the program and (c) are constantly engaging with program members, provide new perks and launch contests to keep the program running. Good examples are:
Gymshark recently announced a points based loyalty program embedded in their mobile app.
Pop-Up Events
Host exclusive events, pop-ups, or meetups for your loyal customers. Make them feel special. Make them feel valued.
Subscriptions
Promote your subscription offers in dedicated campaigns and on dedicated landing pages. We often see brands trying to push new customers towards subscriptions, which can work for certain categories. Otherwise, it’s ok if your customer first tries the product before subscribing, so think about how you’re building the funnel.
Retention isn’t just about driving repeat purchases. It’s about building a community. It’s about turning customers into advocates who shout your name from the rooftops.
Because when you get retention right, you don’t just increase lifetime value (LTV). You create a tribe of loyal fans who’ll stick with you for life.
And the cycle doesn’t stop there. Happy customers refer others, bringing new people into the funnel—and the cycle continues.
What are the Key Social Channels?
Brands have 5 key channels to build and nurture their social media funnel. Let’s look at each of them:
Organic Social
Organic social content can be created and shared in-house through your brand channels, or generated through outreach, relationships, and product seeding.
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube are the biggest social media platforms, so it makes sense to leverage the same platforms for organic reach—especially through short-form videos.
Depending on your audience, Snapchat, Twitch and Pinterest can also play a role.
Earned social media comes from influencers, micro-influencers, creators, publishers and customers who naturally share your products with their followers.
Content should be entertaining (memes), engaging (giveaways) and/or educational (tutorials). And it must be authentic, platform native and timely. These principles apply for all social channels, organic, paid, influencer.
HOLY, a European soft drinks challenger brand approaching $100m revenues, are master of organic and community building on social.
They also repurpose most of its video content across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube - like this post:
Paid Social
Social media is the leading driver of awareness and upper-funnel traffic. Many refer to this as “cold” traffic, since users are typically unfamiliar with your brand—or even the problem your product solves.
Unlike search, which captures high-intent users actively seeking solutions, social disrupts passive browsing to spark new interest in products people weren’t looking for. In other words: it’s about creating intent, not capturing it.
With over 3 billion users, Meta remains the dominant ad platform for growth—especially for SMB and mid-market brands. TikTok and YouTube are rising fast as secondary channels, while platforms like Snapchat and Pinterest play more niche roles.
Advertisers lean on a mix of formats: static images, short-form video, founder-led storytelling, and user-generated content (UGC).
As privacy regulations limit user-level targeting, the key to scaling social ad performance lies in creative volume and creative diversity.
Creative volume means being able to produce a large number of relevant ads.
Creative diversity means that the ads sufficiently vary in their formats (image, video), their hooks, their angles and visual elements. What type of diversity works is very unique to your brand and cracking social ads requires finding this out.
Check how HEIGHTS, a supplements brand, is running ads for different angles (sleepless nights, aging, self-help) directing traffic to the same product site:
You should also understand how you can target cold audiences vs. retarget users who previously engaged with your ads or brand, but did not complete the check-out.
For retargeting ads, brands often directly address key objections or customer concerns, backing their claims with customer reviews, in order to convince customers.
Ad platforms also allow to exclude certain audiences from targeting, and many brands want to exclude their existing customers through uploads of email lists since they want to use social as a channel for new customer acquisition and CRM channels for reactivations.
The key to profitably scale social ads in 2025 is to find the process that works for you to achieve creative scale and creative diversity.
The best brands do not only master creative volume and diversity, but they manage to align the destination (where they send the traffic) with the campaigns they are running on social to create a seamless transition from the ad click and serve content that is relevant to the targeted audience.
Comet helps you achieve this with micro-stores - social commerce funnels that can be tailored for every ad. Are you running ads for a certain persona or angle? Then build a micro-store catering towards this angle. See for example for Supercilium has been executing this strategy with great success:
Influencer
Brands have different options to work with influencers or creators. The most common way is sponsored partnerships, where you pay your influencer partner for each content piece or a package of content pieces.
Influencer pricing is a wild topic and depends on the platform, the influencer reach, their niche, your strategy, and many other factors. See some discussions here, here and here.
Other options are to work on a performance or affiliate basis, where you pay your partner based on clicks or as a percentage of revenue - often in parallel to a fixed fee or as a pure play commission mostly for micro-influencers.
Brands also work in barter deals where they send their products for free in return for the influencer creating content.
A new and trending approach is to blend paid social with influencer, where brands buy the rights for a content piece and use the content piece as an ad creative, and promote this ad via the influencer’s account with their approval.
This tactic is called whitelisting and brands can achieve very attractive CPMs and CPO because it’s a new ad format and it adds additional social proof to the ad since it’s coming from the influencer account.
Influencer can be a significant channel, for example at Wild that was acquired by Unilever in 2025, it contributed 25% of their revenue which can be even more for certain brands.
There are many resources to understand current best practices in influencer. We recommend this YouTube video from the founder of CTC, a leading marketing agency in the US.
Successful influencer marketing requires an experienced team, a process and tools to identify and grow your influencer network and very importantly, the freedom and willingness to give up a certain level of control to the influencer to create authentic content that works for their communities.
In-platform shopping
In-platform shopping like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shopping aims at shortening the path from product discovery to purchase.
On TikTok Shop, brands are able to tag products in their videos and users are able to complete the check-out without leaving the platforms.
Similarly, creators meeting certain criteria are also able to tag products and earn commission as a percentage of every sales.
The key here is to create a large amount of content driving traffic to your in-platform shop which many brands are trying to achieve by working with micro-creators.
This affiliate model is what is driving TikTok Shop in the US and UK and will be expanding among other European countries in 2025.
Brands can also organize live shopping events within TikTok Shop to drive additional traffic to their products and TikTok is encouraging brands to keep a steady live shopping presence to succeed on Shops.
While in-platform shopping offers a seamless user experience and convenience to the shoppers, there are key aspects to consider:
- Products doing well on TikTok Shop are mostly high impulse purchases with low AOVs, do you have similar products in your catalogue?
- TikTok Shop is an indirect channel, similar to Amazon. This means you don’t own the customer relationship (no email address) and will need to reacquire every user
- TikTok Shop is still facing many regularity uncertainties, which you should consider in creating too strong dependencies
We will hear many success stories of brands performing well on TikTok Shop and other in-platform shopping channels in 2025.
Events - pop-ups & live shopping
Community events are on the rise, and many consumers enjoy authentic and engaging events where they can connect with their favorite brands, and fellow community members and get free goodies.
Brands can try to launch in their own location, creating unique brand experiences, but requiring strong operational excellence. Or partner up with retailers or events to embed their brand experience within their partner’s spaces, requiring strong collaboration and partner fit.
Offline events can be very valuable if brands manage to create exclusivity around the events (invites, goodies, exclusive drops) and incentivize customers and local creators (micro and macro) to create engaging content related to the event.
Pop-ups can both serve as a marketing (drive awareness, retention) AND sales tool. See for example the experience from the founder of Yepoda, a Korean Skincare brand launching 6 pop-ups in 12 months.
In times of generic generative AI content, connecting in real life will become even more important which many brands understand well. Let’s look at a few examples of pop-up events organized by DTC brands:
Yepoda organized pop-up stores in luxury retailers (Galaries Lafayette in Paris). HOLY organized a pop-up kiosk in the Berlin train station. These experiences create opportunities for the community to connect and share their experiences online.
An additional option is to organize live shopping events. In live shopping, brands are organizing a live stream of a sales event where they actively engage with the live community to both drive brand engagement as well as sales.
As of today, only a few brands managed to establish live shopping as a meaningful channel. One example is Super Streusel, a German brand selling sweet bakery decorations and regularly organizing streaming events with tutorials and live baking sessions like this one.
The TikTok Shop launch might reactivate the enthusiasm for live shopping, however, we expect the channel to continue playing a minor role in the marketing mix.
Bonus: What are Social Native Storefronts?
When it comes to Conversion Rate Optimization (CVR) in Ecommerce, there is a lot of fog and blender.
Your product category matters. Your marketing and brand positioning matter. And your traffic source matters too, and it matters a lot.
For social traffic (organic, paid,influencer), in 95% of sessions, this traffic will be consumed on mobile devices.
In addition, shoppers from social arrive from a passive state where they want to be entertained and not necessarily intended to buy.
So this context matters when you think about how to optimize your store for social.
There are category specific tactics to consider, however, for most brands, the following tactics can dramatically improve conversions:
First Impression
First impressions do matter, and even more so in social commerce. Your first page should look like a branded online store and invoke confidence.
So highlight your logo, add a strong above the fold visual and copy that capture attention. Remember, it’s likely that your visitors are in a mode of short attention spans and will bounce if they feel the page is not appealing or trustworthy.
All brands place their strongest visuals, copy, offer and CTA above the fold, and dare to be different.
Playfulness
In social, you need to stand out. And the best brands manage to stand out vs. static storefronts by incorporating interactive, playful elements.
For example Starface, a Gen Z skincare brand, builds a playful, social-first and deeply branded experience:
And MSCHF masterfully blends interactions and gamified experiences on their collection pages:
Congruence
Are your messaging, visual design and offers aligned between your creative and the storefront experience?
Visual Content
Content on social is visual and highly engaging, so content on your storefront should follow the same logic for a cohesive experience.
Social proof
As long as you’re not Nike, you need to prove your brand’s worth. Besides the common tactics like star reviews, PR logos and individual reviews, the best brand embed UGC and community content across their sites:
rem beauty’s instagram page on their website, keeping the aesthetic consistent across platforms.
Tumble leverages UGC directly on their homepage.
AG1, Huel and Hexclad embedding expert and influencer testimonials across their store.
Mobile-first
+90% of social traffic is mobile, so your storefront experience must be mobile first, not only responsive. Still for many brands, it’s still not the case with desktop first design patterns, slow loading times and lack of 1 click checkout options.
Gymshark is nailing their customer journey for mobile, with a streamlines UX, grid views, high quality with little impact on loading times, like buttons as hooks to set up a customer account and 1-click checkout.
Landing Pages
Some brands build landing pages that are optimized for a specific channel. For example, Maniko, a European UV Gel Brand is sending most of their traffic to a Meta specific landing page:
Brands that receive most of their traffic from paid social optimize their key pages (product page, cart page) to the specific channel.
For example, AG1 has optimized their main funnel towards their main channel (Meta) plus is using landing pages tailored to specific personas
The most sophisticated brands are able to tailor their funnels or a campaign level to maximize conversion from their paid traffic.
For example, PetLabs is using advertorial funnels that are linked to the messages in their ad creatives:
Another example are shoppable video funnels that you can built using Comet's no-code editor. Supercilium is routing traffic from influencer campaigns and paid social ads through video micro-stores featuring influencer content and optimized for conversion:
Bonus: Whitelisting
Influencer and paid social are blending in different ways. More and more brands learn how to leverage influencers for sales, not for awareness only.
CMOs understand that performance and influencer teams need to closely sync to hit the right audience at the right time.
Below the hood, the more engagement data you generate and associate with your brand, the better the Meta algorithm will work in finding the right audiences for you.
But one of the most interesting ways is whitelisting. In simple terms, whitelisting means taking someone’s content piece and putting ad spend behind this content piece.
The key is to use content from trustworthy channels since the way Meta (and TikTok) will display the content associated with your brand.
Most brands are using influencer content for whitelisting. It works with influencers across sizes and niches, but in our experience, this works best with already established influencer partnerships. Since you will want to have some historical data to understand whether this partner’s content converts, and then double down on it via whitelisting
And whitelisting does not only work with larger influencers, but can work well with your UGC or micro-creators. The key here is that people add additional trust in they see a partner post in their feed and this option is relatively easy to pull off if you are already working with UGC.
Lastly, some brands work with blogs and publishers to take their content pieces ad ads. You need to have access to these publishers in the first place, but if you can find an agreement, the additional social proof can carry you very far.
The best brands pair whitelisting with a special offer and a dedicated storefront experience, creating a whitelisting funnel that can outperform many alternatives. Hexclad in the US is probably the best example for this strategy, where they use Gordon Ramsey as their key ambassador (and shareholder) and build offers around his persona including advertorial pages.
Lastly, whitelisting will not solve all your problems and have additional downsides, like getting the content buy-out, complicating the ROI calculation and potentially delaying the content process.
But it’s a format that serves as an additional source for your creatives and adds to your creative diversity. And nowadays, volume and diversity is key to scale paid social.
Conclusion
Finding your voice on social is more important than ever to build a successful brand. Marketers have a variety of platforms, channels, tactics and tools to execute their social commerce strategies. At Comet, we are excited to help shaping these strategies with some of the most iconic brands in the industry.
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