Nowadays, it would only benefit all kinds of retailers to learn how to bring their products and other offerings to highly popular social media platforms like Facebook. Social commerce has become more popular as consumers frequent shopping online. Knowing how to use such digital tools is especially useful when planning to run a direct selling business online. If you want to fully maximize your reach and ROI through these channels, below are several essential things you need to know and do.
Create A Facebook Page for Your Business
Keep A Well-Maintained Facebook Page to Jumpstart Your Marketing Efforts
A high-page quality Facebook account should be made separate from your personal account. This page should be a dedicated account for your business where you can run various social media campaigns, broadcasting, retargeting, and other strategies to help you boost your direct selling business.
Once that’s taken care of, you can then build a Facebook Shop and connect it to any e-commerce platform to help you maximize the things you can do to promote and monitor your shop. When everything is in place, you can focus your efforts on running ads, and seasonal promotional contests, among other things, to maximize your reach and sales.
Be Familiar with How Facebook Shops and Marketplace Works
Know How to Use the Right Tools and When
Facebook Marketplace is different from Facebook shops. Facebook Marketplace is where users go to buy and sell items. Any type of account can use this feature to buy. Facebook shops, on the other hand, is a feature that allows business owners to set up a single online store where their customers can access both Instagram and Facebook.
These new features allow business owners to engage more effectively with their target audience by allowing them to use the chat features of Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. The platform has also adjusted to allow users to tag their products while doing Facebook live streams. Having the products tagged will make it easier for the customers to redirect to the page where they can order the product. All these features are beneficial when broadcasting to your audience, so make sure you know how these works.
The Basics of Setting Up A Facebook Shop
Before everything else, check if the product you’re selling is allowed to be sold on Facebook. It would be such a hassle to go through the sign-up process and end up having your page taken down. The same idea also holds true for the platform’s commerce policies, and make sure you go through them first before proceeding.
You’ll also need to have a dedicated page for your business before you can create a shop. If you already have that, you next need to set up your commerce manager. This step is vital because this is where you set the checkout method for your shop. There are two methods available in the Philippines so far, you can either redirect your customer to checkout on another site or have them checkout through Messenger or WhatsApp.
The Basics of Selling On Facebook Marketplace
Once your Facebook Shop has been reviewed and created, boost its visibility to other Facebook users by making Facebook Marketplace a sales channel. Its accessibility makes Facebook Marketplace home to thousands of users each month, and there’s no denying its effectiveness as a sales channel. It evolved from a simple online peer-to-peer shopping medium to a full-on marketplace with proper merchant selling features.
Perhaps the best thing about Facebook Marketplace is that your shop’s exposure is focused more on the people surrounding your local community. However, it doesn’t mean that your visibility is limited to them in the same way a physical store is. Users and interested buyers can find you via search or simply when they browse products. Interested buyers can send inquiries right away and you can cater to them easily without having to move from where you are. Prices and product description are also posted along with the item so the process becomes easier. However, it is ideal for you to make sure that provide customers with useful information about the products you’re selling. This will reduce the need to answer queries.
When using this platform, you can also reach out to more potential customers by targeting them through mobile-friendly listings. Just make sure you add Marketplace as a sales channel. If you’re connecting your shop from a different commerce platform, you’ll need to follow a different approach. The steps may vary depending on the limitations of your partner platform as well. Check the rules and policies for both just to be safe.
Use the Right Tools to Elevate Your Presence
Boosting your sales is easy via Facebook. However, it doesn’t mean that there’s no work involved. It requires you to have a little bit of patience and mastery. Starting out can be difficult but also keeping the momentum can be equally challenging. You’ll need to pick up the pace as time goes on because you’ll have more customers. More customers means more orders, so you’ll need to process and monitor more things at once.
To make sure you keep up with the job, you can use several online tools to help you monitor and automate most of the processing that you need to do. You can avail of various e-commerce tools such as what Page365 offers. This order management system helps you sell effortlessly on both Facebook and Instagram. It helps you manage your billing online in a seamless dashboard that was designed to cater to every online seller’s specific needs. It also allows you to view and check your stock system efficiently so you won’t waste any time.
Bottom Line
Using social media to sell products online has never been easier and more accessible to every aspiring business owner. However, in order to succeed in this trade, you’ll need to equip yourself with the right tools and the right knowledge on how to use them. These online tools were designed and built to fit your convenience, however, there’s work that needed to be done on your part. Invest a little time in learning how these tools work to take full advantage of their benefits to your growing business.
