Leveraging social media commerce features such as Instagram’s swipe-up asset is key to increasing brands’ client base, new research says.

The research, released this week by Gartner L2 found that while 65 per cent of brands surveyed had adopted at least one commerce feature across Facebook or Instagram, leading brands facilitated transactions by utilising features on social platforms, such as clicking, tapping or swiping.

An excerpt from the report called on brands to “focus” on commerce features on social media which maximise visibility and accessibility, and also said that with the rising popularity of Instagram stories, “best-in-class” brands focus on “swiping up to commerce.”

“The days of brands using social platforms for only top of funnel hype are long gone. With two thirds of users purchasing directly from social media posts at least once in the past year, platforms are quickly rolling out additional commerce features. Leader brands meet customers at their fingertips sending them to pages with a simple click, tap or swipe,” an excerpt from the report said.

“In order to adapt to changing social media user behaviour, brands must focus on optimising in two main arenas,” an excerpt from the report said, pointing to the need to both experiment with commerce features as they appear and ensure that when customers are linked to a site, their purchasing journey is ‘smooth’ and optimised for mobile usage.

More than 80 per cent of the posts analysed on Instagram stories which used the swipe-up feature were related to commerce, an excerpt from the report said.

While half of the brands analysed used Instagram’s ‘shoppable’ pages, only 19 per cent used Facebook’s analogous feature.

83 per cent of Direct to Commerce brands are commerce-enabled as opposed to 34 per cent of non Direct to Commerce brands, an excerpt from the report said.

In Australia, approximately 60 per cent of Australians use Facebook, while Instagram has 900,000 monthly active users and Twitter has 300,000.

Utilising commerce feature in social platforms is essential to build brand-names and expand client bases, an excerpt says.

“Optimising commerce features is becoming increasingly important for brands – with nearly 70 per cent of the US population tuning into social media, the rise of commerce on social media has only just begun,” the report said.

The report also said that using ‘influencers’ to build content can help deliver additional traffic to brands without having to go through the typical campaign process.