Facebook E-Commerce Tips

More than half of Americans are using Facebook now, and for small businesses, this presents a tremendous marketing opportunity.  Traditional advertising is a one way street that requires multiple marketing efforts and gobs of money to get your word out.  With Facebook E-Commerce, you can get your satisfied customers to pass along their praise of your product at virtually no cost.  The following are some Facebook E-Commerce tips for building your business.

Facebook E-Commerce Tips | Leverage the Facebook Store

Mashable has a great suggestion regarding Facebook E-Commerce tips:  As Facebook social campaigns become more mainstream, marketers can increase ROI by integrating e-commerce functionality. Campaigns leveraging the Facebook store could include:

• Facebook contests that request Likes can automatically send users to the Facebook store to encourage product browsing.
• Businesses can post ads, promotions, flash sales, or product-focused press to their Wall and link to the Facebook store’s PDP pages, enabling quick purchasing ability within the social network.
• By leveraging the Facebook Fans API, brands are empowered to combine “deals of the day” or product announcements with deep links to product detail and purchase pages within the Facebook store. This approach gives the user fast transaction capabilities, while also helping the brand collect the user’s data and demographic details.
• Facebook is currently testing a “Buy With Friends” program, which allows brands to offer discount incentives to users who encourage their friends to buy the same item by publishing purchases on friends’ news feeds.

Facebook E-Commerce Tips | Sharing is Caring

One of the biggest marketing opportunities that Facebook E-Commerce presents is Facebook’s Share, Like and Reviews features.  With traditional advertising, like print advertising, if someone likes your product, it stays with them unless the person makes an effort to share information.  Through Facebook E-Commerce, these special features allow users to comment on items and pass this information along to friends, creating a potentially viral domino effect that influences thousands of eyeballs to view your message.  So if your customer likes your product and comments, then all their friends will see their reviews!

Facebook E-Commerce Tips | Simple Payment Methods

The simplest E-Commerce tip for helping close a sale online is to match the buying experience with what people are most familiar.  Most folks are uncomfortable with giving their financial information online and will resist doing so if anything out of the ordinary occurs.  It is for this reason that Mashable recommends the following:

To uphold an easy user experience, businesses should contain the shopping experience within Facebook, without redirects to their traditional website. A brand’s complete inventory can be extended to Facebook, incorporating individual PDP pages to support comprehensive “online window shopping.” Lastly, upon logging in to Facebook, users should have the flexibility to complete purchases either from Facebook or from the original site at a later time.  In addition to extending the same shopping functionality, businesses should also translate the same security features to Facebook. By integrating the website’s preferred payment system on Facebook (PayPal or otherwise), brands can process transactions the same way as they would on a website. All security offered by the traditional website is therefore maintained via Facebook.

As an old mentor once told me, you cannot manage what you do not track. Therefore, my final Facebook E-Commerce piece of advice is to track your performance.  Facebook offers solutions to tracking, but you can also use other analytics, like Google Analytics and Getclicky.com to track your performance as well.  Then you can make tweaks and changes to your Facebook E-Commerce plan and see what works best!