One of the big shifts in online shopping last year was the emergence of social e-commerce. Brands and retailers started to realize that social networks aren’t just a means to extend their visibility but also a way to pull in more revenue.

The infrastructure of the Internet now enables the sharing of information among networks at a velocity and scale that has been impossible in the offline world. Consider the following statistics:

• 90 percent of people trust recommendations of friends above any form of advertising.
• U.S. Internet users spent 41.1 billion minutes on Facebook, surpassing Google 39.8 billion minutes for the first time (according to comScore).
• 1 in 4 minutes spent on the Internet in the US is spent on Facebook.
• Facebook has 500 million users, adding over 100 million in the past 7 months, and 50% of the active ones log on daily.