Facebook for eCommerce
Facebook is a social networking site that lets people connect and communicate with family, friends, and coworkers, as well as share messages, photos, videos, and games. With Facebook’s widespread reach, the idea of leveraging its popularity to promote businesses is catching on like wildfire. Facebook has become a marketing tool that provides business owners an opportunity to effectively engage customers without a spending a fortune on advertising.
The fact is that people spend a lot of time on Facebook and, as a business owner, you can use it to communicate with your most loyal customers. Unlike individual or personal accounts that can only have a maximum of 5,000 online friends, a fan page is not bound by any limitations as to how many people can “Like” it. Thus, depending on how you promote your page, you can direct an infinite number of fans and their network of friends to your online store (case in point, as of this posting, there are 19,874,022 people who “Like” Starbucks while Coca-cola has 22,899,244).
For easy recall and for use on your website and especially print collateral, be sure to secure your business Facebook username. When you first create your page, the URL is the Facebook domain, followed by your page name and a long string of numbers. Not easy to remember (e.g., www.facebook.com/pages/your-fan-page-name/123456XXXX00000). You can change that to a much simpler www.facebook/yourbusinessname, once you have reached at least 25 likes.
We all know that word-of-mouth advertising is far more effective than anything a business owner could advertise themselves, short of giving stuff away (which they often do on Facebook). It is fair to say that the people who hit the “Like” button on your fan page are loyal customers or are interested in your products. Since all wall posts and messages will be seen by these fans, you are assured that you are reaching the right audience, and that your message will be spread virally (the phenomenon that occurs when word-of-mouth meets the web).
Another way businesses are using Facebook is as a customer service tool. As long as you are keeping up with customer feedback regularly, you can address customer concerns right away. What people are saying about your product, or business in general, can inform your future marketing efforts and how you conduct business.
Lastly, if you wish to spend additional advertising dollars, Facebook can help target your advertising to particular segments and charges, either by impressions or click throughs. Creating a Facebook ad is as simple as clicking on the sidebar promoting this offering (usually on the right side). Next, upload your image/ad, then select age, location, gender, education, occupation, relationship status, interests and languages. Facebook gathers these details from users’ personal profile and presents the number of users who match these criteria.
Facebook is where the people are, so it’s only natural for businesses to take advantage of its marketing opportunities. Make the most of it and you can stay connected with your customers while promoting your business. Like?
By: Shirley Tan
