This week ShopTab had the chance to sit down with one of our clients at azcentral.com, a division of Republic Media, which is owned by Gannett Company Inc. (NYSE: GCI).  We spoke with Mark Hiland, Senior Director of Digital Operations, who is responsible for creating and executing the content strategy for azcentral.com. Recently, azcentral.com deployed ShopTab to host and sell photos directly to their highly engaged audience of over 37,000 followers on Facebook.

Q: Why sell photos on Facebook?

A: Audience analysis indicated photos are the most popular content consumed from our postings on Facebook. We were looking for a solution to capture incremental revenue, leveraging our photo assets.

Q: What kind of success have you seen from this?

A: in the last 12 months, we have experienced dramatic increases in referral traffic from Facebook and continue to experiment with ways, like ShopTab, to drive this even higher.  We see very high social engagement in terms of commenting and sharing when we post our pictures on our Wall so adding a commerce option makes logical sense and provides exciting incremental revenue opportunities.  In terms of photo sales, it is early in our deployment and marketing but engagement rates have been high and we see more conversions every day.

Q: How frequently do you update your image listings?

A: Beginning this month, we will be updating our listings daily, Monday-Friday.

Currently our store is filled with college and high school football photos as they have always been one of the most popular images sold. The high school football season just ended so we are using ShopTab to sell photos from Facebook and capture the attention of those readers.  As I discussed earlier, we get tremendous engagement when we post new photos in Facebook and many of our followers have no idea that that can purchase a quality picture of their team winning the state title or that classic Arizona dust storm that they just commented on.

Q: Do you use ShopTab to post photos for other events and engagements?

A: We will begin pushing other popular image categories this month. We started with high school sports knowing the interest in these photos as well as the use of social media with that demographic. Later this month, we will be adding photos related to weather, Arizona landscape and the most impactful photos of the year.

Q: What has your experience been with ShopTab?

A: The application was easy to deploy. ShopTab’s managers and developers have been extremely helpful in answering any question and solving any issues we may have had with the tool.  We expect to prove out the return on investment with photos and then expand our use of social commerce into other verticals that are popular with our followers.

Q: Would you recommend ShopTab to other eCommerce businesses? Why or why not?

A: Definitely. If you want a cost-effective tool, easy to maintain that provides another vehicle to drive incremental revenue, then ShopTab is a product you want to use.

It is important to note that azcentral.com uses a service from myCapture.com to manage and process their photo sales. The sophisticated commerce engine from myCapture was easily integrated with ShopTab’s Facebook store app and a detailed implementation of the Facebook Photo Store set-up with myCapture.com is available.

Azcentral.com’s use of ShopTab for selling photos is a great example on how to increase awareness and sales via a social network channel for any news site, artist, photographer, graphic designer, or other art creators.  Let us know how you may be using a Facebook Shop to promote non-traditional products and services.