Powerful Tips for Using Facebook To Boost Your Ecommerce Store:

With more than 1.5 billion registered users, a figure continuously rising, Facebook is a social networking powerhouse. It’s worth more than the annual output of many countries and has users from all across the globe. The amount of data Facebook has, and the detail with which people willingly share information about them on Facebook, makes it any marketer’s dream platform. Just look at some of these stats.

• Facebook has more than 1.5 billion registered users.
• More than 699 million people log in to Facebook every day.
• An average person spends around 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook every month. This makes it a total of 700 billion minutes globally.
• More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook.

Currently there are thousands of Facebook pages where people are selling products directly to their fans. While it’s not always the best strategy to depend completely on Facebook for ecommerce sales, it certainly can be a part of your broader ecommerce plan.
If you have an ecommerce website or an online store, you can use the power of Facebook to reach your target customers much more effectively and drive them to your online store and boost sales.
Here are a few tips for using Facebook to strengthen your ecommerce store.

1. Content is the King – Even on Facebook

Quality content is the king everywhere. But the kind of content that resonates with Facebook users is very different from blog content or articles. Here, if you write 1000 word status updates, very few of your fans will have the patience to read till the end.
Facebook users like short, catchy, visually appealing and action oriented posts created in a fun way. Above all your posts should provide users value. Demonstrate your knowledge about your niche and products in your status updates.
Also, don’t be obsessed with your own product images, links and blog posts all the time. Regularly share stuff from other blogs and websites that your fans may find useful (not from your competitor’s site, of course).

2. Optimize Your Store for Facebook Engagement

Your ecommerce store should also be optimized for maximum Facebook engagement (Likes, Comments, Shares). You can do that in a number of ways. Offer sign up via Facebook. Make sure your store’s product pages have clearly visible social media sharing widgets. Add the Facebook comments widget to your product pages so that the user comments are visible on their Facebook profiles as well. Add a small statement below the product images encouraging users to share on Facebook.
These are basic things but many ecommerce stores don’t have them in place because of which they fail to take advantage of Facebook.

3. Use Engaging Descriptions and Smart Calls To Action

Whenever you add new products to your store, you’d most likely share them on your Facebook page. When you do that, make sure you add an engaging 1-2 line description with your links. Engaging or catchy descriptions drive more clicks as compared to simple link shares.
Use high engagement words in your posts. Research shows that status updates that include the words Facebook, Why, Most, World, How, Health, Bill, Big, Says and Best get most engagement and shares. Similarly,

• Posts with less than 80 characters attract 23% more engagement.
• Using emoticons increases comments by 33%.
• Question posts get 100% more comments.
• Quotes get 26% more Likes and 19% more shares.

Also, make your descriptions action oriented and add clear calls to action with them. Facebook recently introduced the “Add Call to Action” option with status updates. Always use it with your status updates and link shares.

4. Boost Sales With Contests, Deals and Special Offers

Facebook users love contests and discount deals. Running competitions is found to be the most effective engagement technique for ecommerce stores. Almost 35% users “Like” Facebook pages to participate in contests. So give them what they want. Ask questions and use “Like for Yes, Comment for No” type techniques for feedback. These small fun activities can boost your engagement significantly.

5. Focus on High Quality Visual Content

I’ve already mentioned the importance of content, but visual content deserves a separate mention. Facebook users love visual content like images, info graphics, videos, memes etc. Image based content gets almost 40% more interaction as compared to simple text posts.
But to get the best results, you need to mix up your updates with a combination of text only, text+image and image/video only updates. For ecommerce stores, product images get the highest engagement.

6. Run Targeted Facebook Advertisements

There’s no better paid advertisement mode for ecommerce stores than Facebook advertisements. Facebook Ads have improved drastically over the last couple of years. They’re not only much simpler to configure but also bring much more targeted results as compared to other advertisement modes. You can target users based on their location, interests, gender, like/dislikes, recent activity, pages liked and dozens of other criteria. Start with a small budget of around $50 and test different ads to see what works well for you. Once you understand how it works, increase your budgets gradually.

7. Simplify the Buying Process

One important thing is to make the payment and buying process as simple as possible for your customers. Normally ecommerce stores add a link to the product pages with their Facebook status updates. There’s nothing wrong in doing this, but since it involves multiple redirections, there are high chances that buyers would abandon the purchase mid-way through. A smart option is to use a direct link to the checkout page or, even better, use a Facebook app to accept payments directly on Facebook. There are several Facebook ecommerce store apps where you can configure your products for direct selling on Facebook.

8. Use Facebook for Customer Support

A great way to show your fans and prospective buyers that you care about them, is to move the customer support to your Facebook page. Ask users to share their product feedback, compliments/complaints and concerns of your Facebook page. Actively respond to such comments, and ensure quick problem resolution. This will show the world that you really care about your customers.

9. Use a Combination of Manual and Automated Posts

Most ecommerce stores serve customers belonging to multiple countries, due to which they need to operate in different time zones. Of course you can’t stay on Facebook all the time. So it’s recommended that you automate some of your posts to stay in touch with customers from all time zones. You can use the BufferApp or HootSuite for this purpose. But keep posting manually as well.
Research shows that the engagement levels are 18% higher on Thursday and Friday, and 32% higher on weekends. Every day, around 1PM gets the most shares and 3PM gets the most clicks. Keep these time slots and days in mind while scheduling your automated posts.

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12 Steps to Creating Great Content Campaigns:

Give people great content and they will give you their time, their attention, their loyalty, even their money. But there’s a catch? It isn't easy to create great content. For every viral Volvo advert featuring Jean Claude Van Damme doing epic splits across moving trucks, digital platforms are awash with thousands of videos that nobody watches and articles that nobody reads.

OK so you might not have the budget to pull off this kind of thing, but it doesn't just come down to money.

The truth is that the majority of content marketing out there is doomed to relative insignificance. Creating great content is just one aspect of creating great content marketing campaigns. There are many more considerations to bear in mind and ignoring any one can mean the difference between failure and success.

Below are our 12 steps to creating apically good content campaigns.

1. Focus your aim

What do you want your content to achieve? Do you want to sell more products, drive traffic to website pages, get likes or re tweets, raise awareness of your brand, explain details of a new product or position yourself as a thought leader? You can’t create high performance content without addressing this fundamental question. It helps your campaign stay focused and shapes the types of content that you will create.

2. Be true to your core values

You can’t be something you’re not. Volvo isn't a sporty car brand. A Stannah Stairlift isn't a cool home accessory. To create great content, you need to work with the essence of your brand. Are you funny or serious? Important? Well-liked? Expensive? Useful? Isolate this value, cherish it and use it as the foundation of your content.

3. Understand your audience 

It’s critical that you don’t skip this step. A great content campaign isn't a fire-and-forget broadcast. It needs to be targeted to reach your intended audience and potential customers. But who are they really? To answer this question you have to look beyond the cold demographic data sat in your market research files. Where do they hang out and what platforms do they use? What type of content do they consume the most? Do they read long or short articles, watch YouTube videos or Vines, engage with Facebook discussions or Twitter hash tags? Attention spans these days are low but tolerance for boredom is lower even still. You could have only one chance to hook your intended audience in, so make sure you get it right first time.

4. Think like a publisher 

A great content campaign works in a cycle – entertain your audience, attract new people, keep those people, encourage them to come back for more and stop them from going elsewhere. Don’t trust to chance. Don’t make things up as you go. Think like a publisher and put an effective strategy in place to plan what you will say, how you will say it and where you will publish it.

5. Tap into emotion 

What sets great content apart from ordinary content? Emotion. Great content stirs something primal inside its audience – happiness, sadness, excitement, disbelief, curiosity, wonder, anger, agreement, and so on. Balancing logic and emotion in your marketing, across all your content, is key to both informing the world about your amazing product or service whilst building genuine brand personality. But whilst it’s important to convey the facts about your service or product, if your content doesn’t elicit an emotion, then you’re doing it wrong. Go back to step 3 and try again.

6. Make the right type of content 

Emotion is your hook. Virgin Atlantic’s curated Instagram galleries give viewers an inspirational insider’s view of Tokyo and San Francisco. While Intel’s IQ website spins away from Intel’s processor business to explore the outer edges of tomorrow’s exciting software and technology innovation. Hook your reader with emotion first, encouraging them to seek out more facts and detailed information later.

7. Let other people do the work 

Making great content is hard work. But you don’t need to do it all yourself. Re purpose and recycle existing content into new formats on new platforms. Encourage people to talk about it and share it. If the content is ‘great’ enough, people may even pay to be associated with it.

8. Be more social 

Don’t broadcast. Instead, take part, be genuine and engage with your audience.

9. Create content guidelines (and stick to them) 

Ensure the consistency of your content and your message by creating a set of guidelines that cover tone of voice, design, attitude, use of humor, words you can (and can’t use), spellings and appropriate visuals. The Content Marketing Institute’s blog guidelines, for example, show the type of posts that they are looking and the key elements that those posts need to be accepted (e.g. real-life examples; videos, photos, charts, screenshots and other visual content; specific and actionable recommendations for readers).

10. Plan it out 

Make a content map. Define the type of reader or viewer that you’re hoping to reach and the stage in the sales funnel that the content fits into – e.g. building awareness, creating a deeper interest, helping them to evaluate your product or service, and supporting them after they have committed to you and fulfilled the content goal.

11. Don’t just press publish, shout!! 

Every minute, on average, Google receives over 4 million search queries per minute, 70 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube and Instagram users post over 200,000 new images. Your content won’t stand out unless you shout about it. Spend 10-20% of campaign budget on seeding. Think digital ads, Youtube ads and blog placements, plus blog write-ups, digital PR, re tweets and social media outreach.

12. Measure and change

Define how you’ll measure success? Look back at your goals (step 1). What metric matters most to you? Is it views, visitors, re tweets, click troughs, an increase in traffic or a reduction in bounce rate? Use appropriate tools (Google Analytic, Hootsuite, etc) to track the performance of each piece of content you create and use the data to assess whether it succeeded or failed in its goal. Did you succeed? Then do more of what works. Fail? Change your approach and try, try again.

This post was written by Jon Mowat, who is a former BBC film maker and now runs British based video production and marketing company, Hurricane Media. You can follow Hurricane on Google+, Twitter or Facebook.

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