Since 2009, we have had clients that comment after a few days or weeks using our app that  they aren’t selling enough to justify the expense of their Facebook Shop. I’m always puzzled why they are so surprised at the outcome.  A quick review of their Facebook Fan Page and other online assets reveals an inactive or unengaged audience on Facebook and little indication, through online conversation or promotion, that they actually have products or services available for discussion or purchase.  Hmmm….you can’t get a horse to drink water if you don’t ever show him where it is!

While we love the ShopTab product, the answer for these unsuccessful social sellers isn’t our technology or anyone else’s.  Solutions like ShopTab are easy to set-up, quick to integrate payment solutions and provide quality merchandising templates.  These applications incorporate excellent tactical features, such as a Facebook product promotion button, that can deliver impact on a fan page or in a client’s news feed.  However, these only play a small part in the success of a Facebook store.

So, why are some owners unsuccessful and others tell us that they sold out of their items in their first week of running the Facebook Store (from a great client call yesterday)?  We offer these essential tips.

Here’s ShopTab’s Top 4 “No Lose” Ways to Facebook Shop Success

1. CREATE A PLAN: Create a strategy and marketing plan for social selling and then integrate it into your overall company marketing plans. Build a store and they will come doesn’t work – it didn’t for bricks and mortar, e-commerce sites and won’t for Facebook Shops.  If social selling doesn’t fit into your marketing plans, you are in trouble.  If you don’t have an overall marketing plan to connect the social plan to, you aren’t ready for your store!  Plans work – ask any successful military leader, entrepreneur or corporate executive.
2. ENGAGE: Social networks are by nature social. Get into discussions about your market and all things relevant.  Being social doesn’t guarantee success but if you aren’t engaged, I can guarantee social selling failure. Come on, it might even be fun for you!
3. PROMOTE:  It has been proven that fans on social networks like Facebook are looking for deals, exclusives and unique information from their favorite brands. Promoting a new product, an exclusive offer, a discount or soliciting feedback on products are viable options to integrate into your dialog. While this shouldn’t dominate your posts, it can be integrated into your mix with success.
4. LISTEN AND RESPOND: Solicit and ask for feedback, respond to posts, reach out to new fans and ask them why they liked you. These connections will help you to learn from your prospects and clients what will make sense for future social selling engagements and promotions. This is how the best companies win.

The good news…. we’ve seen it work over and over and over again. We have clients across the globe that started their online business with a ShopTab store and are growing each month. We have large companies that can validate a hard ROI with the benefit of knowing they are engaging and developing their best clients.

Is this effort worth it for you? A couple of weeks ago we told you a Facebook Fan is worth close to $175 a year for large brands.  This number was up 28% from two years earlier. If memory serves me right, we were having these same types of discussions about e-commerce a decade ago and this online market is currently close to 20% of all U.S. sales.  Social Commerce has the potential for a similar future and now is your time to get into the game.  Just start with a plan.

 

Image credit – http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224547

 

Social Commerce isn’t just limited to selling of hard goods or services. Online selling has topped $1 trillion worldwide, according to eMarketer, and the sale of digital goods has been the fastest growing category for the last few years.  The opportunity to incorporate digital products into your social marketing is extremely compelling when you consider the scale of Facebook and Twitter users alone.

We have thousands of clients that have been successful selling their products on Facebook using our social selling strategy and Facebook Store app.  We believe that digital goods may provide an even more compelling opportunities to raise awareness for your brand and products because of these factors:

• Social commerce is a perfect environment for impulse buying. This is especially true for things like books, music or even software. In many cases these are small purchase price items.
• Social references (i.e. my fans and friends) have a high influence rate on purchases. What better way to be exposed to a product either shared by a friend or promoted by a fan page I enjoy.
• Social network users are looking for deals.  Make distinct special offers within your Facebook Store for your products will drive incremental sales and not impact your traditional online selling channels.
• Marketing requires multiple impressions before a prospect makes a purchase. Facebook users are on their news feed for hours every month. You can’t afford to miss those impressions.

Weather you have an existing e-commerce site, sell your digital products in a marketplace or sell via your blog, we believe adding a Facebook Store  will an essential element to add to your marketing strategy to engage your social network.

(Example ShopTab Facebook Store listing using Google Checkout)

To facilitate the digital purchase, we’ve recently recommending using Payloadz (www.payloadz.com) with ShopTab since they provide a highly secure platform, numerous payment integration options (Google, Amazon and PayPal), a simple set-up process that creates HTML code, a marketplace for your products and the ability for others to sell your products with a detailed affiliate marketing program.  Feedback from a few clients indicates they have covered all of the bases for their products. There are numerous digital download selling options outlined here that potentially can work with ShopTab.

If you have digital goods and have built a Facebook presence, now is the time to launch your store and begin your social marketing.  For simple implementation instructions, we have provided a detailed FAQ on digital products in your Facebook Store.  Let us know what you think of this solution.

Every wonder if your social marketing efforts are worthwhile? According to recent research by Syncapse, “the average value of brand fans in key consumer categories has increased 28% to $174.17.” Based upon our interpretation of this research, social marketing is well worth your effort!   We highly recommend that you take the time to review their insights in this research report, Value of a Facebook Fan 2013.  However, the specific declared dollar value may be only a portion of each fans value to your business.

As a social marketing apps developer, we come to this party as biased. This comes from continued client validation of ShopTab, our leading Facebook Shop application, which has been used by tens of thousands of retailers.  Regardless of our bias, this new research is further evidence to organizations that there is a hard dollar payoff for your participation in the emerging social channel.  This new information can be extremely important for organizations that have been hesitant to embrace new marketing methods and channels.

Syncapse provides further evidence (read the report!) that these fans are “super consumers” of your products – they spend more, engage more and advocate for you. We believe this is important information because many companies, especially smaller ones, struggle to segment their clients.  The data suggests that social networks, like Facebook, give you an opportunity to segment your best clients inside of a unique channel.  If these users are going to buy more, give you more feedback and tell more people about you, shouldn’t you treat them in a very special way?  This report reveals excellent validation for you to put a unique and compelling marketing plan together for these social channels to enhance your relationships with your best clients.

As it relates to your Facebook Shop, we believe you can easily leverage this app as a way to facilitate discussions about your brand and products. Some of these discussions will drive revenues but more importantly it can encourage discussion about your products. These prompted or spontaneous conversations can be invaluable for your future product developments.   Most people call this “market research” and it is typically very expensive to conduct.  We’ve seen tremendous response from fans to our clients that ask for feedback on a product (colors, options or features needed), encourage new ideas for products or a recent example when a client promoted a product before it was produced to determine client demand – how brilliant is that? And extremely valuable!

We suggest you use this report as a call to action to drive more users to become a fan of your Facebook Fan Page.  On your Fan Page you’ll need to provide compelling conversation, new ideas and engagement opportunities for these special customers to encourage their participation.  Additionally, the use of Facebook marketing (promoted content posts or targeted ads) and other marketing vehicles (website, email, newsletter, print marketing and client center contacts) are great opportunities to encourage qualified individuals to connect with your page.  We don’t just want numbers; we want new quality fans that will fit our profile of a hyper-valued client.

What do you think about the research that each Facebook fan is worth $175? Does it make sense to you?

In the last week or so we’ve had fantastic feedback from some of our new clients using our Facebook Shop. One retailer indicated he sold more with his Facebook store in two weeks than he had with his website in over six months. The other told us she sold-out her inventory within 48 hours on a product special.  And another said he sold over $100 in product in less than a week and only has 15 fans for his store!  We love to hear this kind of news and it prompted us to write this week to help some of our PayPal Checkout clients to creatively use their store to increase revenue by driving urgency, awareness and opportunities for their fans, friends and new prospects.

Most of our recent social research validates that clients like to learn about your company and its products AND that they view social channels as a great opportunity find deals, unique offerings and to share these with their friends.  Don’t let them down! We’ll outline three ideas that you can use to increase the engagement with you clients and help you to drive revenues.

Free Shipping

Who doesn’t like free shipping? In many cases this can save your client 5 to 10% on their purchase.  We suggest the following to make this work for your store:

- Turn off your shipping costs in ShopTab listings or PayPal (depending on where you have them set). Find video details on setting your shipping here.

- Put a banner on your store header highlighting your offer. Also, highlight the offer on your Facebook page.

- Use the “PROMOTE” button to highlight a product to your news feed and the free shipping period of time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- Let your fans know that this is only available through your Facebook Fan Shop.

Purchase Multiples

Again, shipping is a great incentive to help upsell a client.  We’ve seen great calls to action around buying more than one product to get free shipping.

- Update your shipping charges for “By Quantity” to reflect free shipping of 2 or more product purchases. Make this setting active.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(PayPal Shipping Configuration above)

- Update your header/banner for the store highlighting the opportunity to for your clients and prospects to remind them on every page to buy more than one product.

Discount your Price

- While there isn’t a way for PayPal to discount the prices, you can set the price to your “sale” price inside of ShopTab’s admin.

- Create your messaging in the product title with a description – “Black Dress – 35% off until Thursday” and in the description field.

- Set your inventory levels correctly so you don’t oversell what you don’t have in stock.

  (update your listing)

  (set inventory levels  in the listing)

There are all kinds of ways to promote specific products or even all products in your store. We like these ideas but know that you probably have implemented even better ideas. Let us know what you have done to create opportunities with your clients. Good Selling!

What is the best possible way for you to reach your fans inside of Facebook with your Facebook Shop? Simple, with a Facebook post that shows up in their news feed!  According to Facebook expert, Jay Baer, 48% of users check their Facebook news feed more than once a day. That means that your fans live in their news feed. They’re typically not checking your business/fan page on a daily basis to see what you’ve posted; they’re waiting for your updates to show up in their NEWS FEED.  So in order to create a presence with your fan base and their friends you need to promote your products. This is as simple as one click for ShopTab users.

Our “Promote” button is located within each product listing in ShopTab’s admin and is the best promotional tool available to you. With one click on the “Promote” link you can enter the promotional text you want to appear with the product in your post. Snap! Your post goes live on your Facebook business/fan page and into your fan’s news feed – all in one simple step.

It is important to remember that we don’t want to come off selling too hard – we want to create conversation and engagement.  Below are some ideas on great ways to create creative engagement around your product posts from our Social Commerce Strategy document:

• Introduce products on Facebook first, offer a special deal for these early users. Create urgency by defining a short time period for the offer.
• Your Facebook store is an opportunity to present something different than what is on your website. Leverage this concept in your pricing, packaging and offers.
• Ask a question regarding which product your fans might like best or colors they prefer.
• Create a category called “Best Sellers” or “Most Popular” and feature that category on your first store page.
• You don’t have to put all of your products into your Facebook shop. If you have a fully functioning website then use this as an opportunity to promote “on sale” items by creating a special category for your store or even have it as the only category.
• Promote a specific product, sale item or packaged offering in the header graphic on every page. This graphic may be linked to the website page that supports this promotion.
• Create easy navigation to find your products. Use the “Categories” and “Subcategories” functions to make it easy for your users
• Many stores have provided free shipping as an option only for Facebook fan purchases with a special code or link to a special web checkout page.

We will walk you through the new Promote feature with step-by-step in the images below.

Step 1: Click the Promote button for the product you would like to post in your newsfeed.

Step 2: Type in the text you want to appear with your post. Then click the Send Promotion button.

*Please note the first time you use the Promote feature Facebook may ask for permission to post on your behalf. You will want to click Allow. Also be sure you are logged into your Facebook account that is the admin for your business/fan page you want to post to. If you are an admin for more than one page it will ask you which page you want to post to within the dialog box.

Step 3: You will see a notice in your ShopTab admin that your message was posted.

Step 4: Your post will appear in your fans newsfeed.

Step 5: The post will appear in your business/fan page newsfeed as well.

It’s as easy as that! Now you can post away, but remember don’t spam your fans and always keep the conversation going. People like to buy from businesses that are personable and engaging not “salesly” and pushy.