Advertising Your Ecommerce Business On Facebook

Facebook Business Pages are a massive opportunity to promote your Ecommerce business online. Where else can you promote your online shop to a potential audience of over 500 million active users for free?

Promoting your Ecommerce web site to generate traffic to your store that will achieve sales is something that is often assumed to be expensive and very time consuming by online shop owners.
There are many avenues to choose from to advertise your online shop that will vary in financial cost and time to manage each with varying results. The first options that are usually considered are the numerous ‘pay per click’ facilities such as Google Adwords that can be very costly to run and while increasing traffic to your online store, the traffic generated by a ‘ppc’ campaign may not necessarily convert to sales.
Then there is the widely suggested article writing, blogging and forum commenting that can be done for free but these are best considered as Search Engine Optimisation activities with limited audiences that probably generate some traffic in the short term but not necessarily sales.

Setting up a Facebook Fan Page for your Business is a simple process. With only a little effort and time required. By taking advantage of the viral aspect that Facebook offers, getting ‘fans’ will help you to promote your online shop and the products you offer for sale, generating that much desired traffic and achieving those all important sales.

Setting Up a Business Page on Facebook

After clicking the ‘Create a page’ option when logged into your personal Facebook account, you are offered three different options for the page you would like to set up.
These are, a community, a group or a business page. For an Ecommerce business a Business page is the most appropriate option with the best features. Here’s a summary:

Groups or Community Pages are great for organising on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a certain activity or cause like a Yoga Class or community activity. Group Pages are better for bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.

A Business Page offers more functionality alongside the interactionthe other pages offer and will allow you to grow as big as you want. There are many applications available (both free and paid for) that can be integrated with your business page meaning you can customise your pages to match the appearance of your ecommerce web site, list your product catalogue and even be able to offer a checkout facility allowing you to sell direct from from your page.

Once you’ve set up your Facebook Business Page the plan is to encourage vistors to make comments on your wall, click the ‘like’ button on your business page, or even better, click the share button on your post. The reason for this is because it will then be displayed on that Facebook users news feed which means that all of their friends will see it. This is where the ‘viral’ aspect of Facebook kicks in.

Tips For Customising Your Facebook Business Page

A Facebook Business Page is an ideal place to promote brand awareness for your ecommerce store so make sure that you upload your online shop logo, maybe edit it to include your web address.
Make regular announcements on your Business Page. These can be Product Updates, special offers or anything that will be of interest to your visitors. It’s worth remembering that a Facebook Business Page is about content and interaction with both existing and potential customers so regular posting of interesting content will ensure that you’re showing up in the news feeds of your fans and improve the chances of your content of being shared.
Your ‘information page’ is an ideal facility to encourage contact from potential customers. Ensure that as many of the fields are filled it as possible. You can have a clickable web address, an overview of your ecommerce activity, available brands and products.
Consider creating a Custom Facebook Business Fan Page which can also be configured to be the landing page for vistors to your Busines Pages. This is a perfect opportunity to have a page with a sales message, graphics, video or any other content that you want to provide. For example, you can give a short description of your ecommerce web site, your latest offers or product lines as well as telling people to click the “become a fan” button.
Use the sidebar on your Business Page. Here you can put anything that you can put in your tabs, so it is an opportunity to keep your tabs area un-cluttered. Options are endless but the usual ones are the newsletter signup form, important links to your ecommerce site pages, banners and son on.
There are a number of Facebook Applications available for free that are in effect RSS aggregators. These are an ideal way of adding additional and regular content to your Facebook Business Page by using your ecommerce sites ‘new products’ RSS feed or one from your blog if you have one.

Promoting Your Facebook Business Page

If you want fans to start the ‘viral’ ball rolling then you need to promote your Business Page by linking to your page from everywhere you can, your own sites, any blogs or forums that you participate on for example. Advertise your Facebook Business Page predominantly on your ecommerce store, add a link to it in your stores newsletters and in your e-mail template next to your web-site contact details. The more people that know you’re on Facebook the better.

Regularly send updates to your Facebook fans. This feature is pretty much the same as sending an email but don’t overdo it so it is like spam in your fans inbox, nobody wants a bombardment of meaningless messages from you. If used wisely, this useful Facebook feature will let you update fans about your products, sales, and events with very little effort.

This Free Facility from Facebook can drive a significant amount of traffic to your ecommerce web shop and this boost in traffic increases the liklihood of sales. If used correctly, as your fan base grows your online shop will benefit from the interaction with both potential and existing customers within a freindly social environment that most visitors are comfortable with creating the best environment to sell within.