How to use Facebook stores to their full potential? The ABCs of effective sales on the portal.

Who is it designed for?

In theory, a Facebook store lets you sell all products that are presented in the right way to the right people. In practice, however, there are certain products that are easier to sell via Facebook. Paul Mardsen, a British psychologist and expert in the consumer psychology, lists a group of products which are more likely to be successfully sold. These include:

• Cult and niche products, gadgets
• Products which are trendy in a given period
• Products which are bought on impulse
• Products which are used to create one's image (fashion, music, beauty, sport, multimedia)
• Products which can be easily recommended

If some of the above fit your target group, then you may find selling on Facebook worth considering. Remember that some purchases on Facebook are made on impulse. Therefore, your success depends on attractive elements that lead customers to buy your products. Take advantage of it!

Provide the best offer

Remember: Facebook users expect to be treated differently from ordinary customers. This is especially true if they are fans of your brand.

• Frequent CHANGES to a narrow and specialised selection a store has on offer
• Good prices and SPECIAL offers
• Providing a UNIQUE range of products

Everyone likes to feel special. One of the reasons customers will click the Like button and buy your products on Facebook is the hope that they will be able to get items at attractive prices and products that are not available to everyone else. If you provide discounts and special offers that are only available for your brand's fans, you will keep them coming back for more!

As certain as death and taxes

We all know how the keywords "limited" and "exclusive" increase our desire to buy something. The phrase "free" has even greater power. It might be just free delivery. It doesn't matter. The result will always be the same – attracting more fans.

Offer visualisation

Remember that Facebook is a rich, multimedia environment. Nothing attracts customers' attention better than:

• high resolution, detailed photos of your products
• funny or educational films presenting a given product

"Old" tricks are pretty good

An online store on Facebook should take advantage of all its social features. There must be a Like button next to each product. Using the Share option is also essential. This feature creates the opportunity that your product together with an appropriate comment (e.g., "My birthday wish"), will be displayed on the customer's Facebook wall and all their friends will become aware of it.

Use your Facebook store for PR

No one is anonymous on Facebook – use this to your advantage. Please note that comments and recommendations are visible to everybody. They can therefore attract more potential customers.

Take word-of-mouth marketing to the next level and configure your store settings so that Facebook comments are displayed below your products. the customers who do not have a Facebook account will see other customers' opinions about a given product.

This kind of recommendation system shapes customers' opinions and, as a result, builds trust in the brand and provides a positive image.

Reward people who are active

Some data, especially your customer's name, is public on Facebook. This helps you to reach people who are active in publishing positive comments or recommending what your store has on offer on Facebook. In other words, you can reach opinion leaders with minimal effort.

How to benefit from this?

• Create a loyalty program using the store settings panel
• Reward the opinion leaders with a small gift from your offer
• Thank the opinion leaders in public, e.g. on your fan page

If you follow these instructions, you will make your customers feel special and appreciated.

Advertise your Facebook store in your online store

Inform your online store customers that they also have the opportunity to buy your products in your Facebook store. Mention that special offers will be available there on a regular basis.

Better to ask the way than go astray

F-commerce relationships function as a two-way street and your customers are an excellent source of information. Ask them for their frank opinion on whether they like what's on offer at your Facebook store and whether the ordering process is convenient.

Do not hesitate to ask your customers questions and listen to their ideas. They will see that you care about a mutual and open relationship and that you respect their opinion.

Good timing – what is it in practice?

The highest number of users visit Facebook on working days, first around 9 a.m. and then around 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. According to Bitly.com, the greatest number of visitors falls on Wednesday at 3 p.m.

The time of day when people visit Facebook is associated with... working hours. At 9 a.m., people start their day at work with drinking coffee and browsing Facebook. Around midday, they think about lunch and begin to feel relaxed, and so they visit Facebook again. When the working day is about to end, many people will check their Facebook wall yet again.

Bear this in mind when adding new offers that will display on your customers' walls.

A perfect store on Facebook

What's on offer at your Facebook store and its content must be different from your online store, but please remember that your Facebook store must also provide the most useful and the most required functions of the latter.
Therefore, you need to provide:

• The opportunity to buy products on hire purchase
• The option to share discounts and vouchers with your fans
• A fast shopping process (making a purchase in a few quick steps)
• Personal pick up
• Fast and secure payments directly from Facebook
• The opportunity to participate in a loyalty program
• Free returns and warranties for products on offer
• An attractive store look achieved through proper product presentation

This will make the process of placing an order as easy as in traditional online stores.

Paid advertisements

If you want to attract more potential customers, you can also use the additional, PAID functions provided by Facebook. These options include targeted advertisements on Facebook that allow you to reach a specific target group.

Effective targeted advertisements help you to stand out from hundreds of useless pieces of information, which Facebook has no shortage of.

The social network is a vast data base. The Facebook advertisement wizard provides multiple options for selecting specific recipients.
These include:

• Geographic criteria, such as country, state, city and even postal code.
• Demographic criteria, such as age, sex, date of birth or relationship status.
• Interests from which you can select general categories or limit the size of a target group by using certain keywords associated with a specific interest. As a result, you can reach people who like specific books, films, music, TV programs or have certain hobbies, political opinions or religions.
• Place of work, education and languages.
• Connections – e.g. an advertisement can be aimed at fans of a given page only, at people who do not belong to the fan group or at friends of your fans.

One of the most recent Facebook features is Lookalike Audiences. It is based on additional factors, such as interests or demographic criteria. Your advertisements will be displayed only to people who have profiles similar to those of your existing customers, based on common features.

How to use Custom audiences?

A new function of targeting ads on Facebook - Custom audiences - enables you to target a given ad to your current customers! The ad which is displayed to recipients who know the shop results in a very high conversion and effectively complements other loyalty actions.

All you have to do is to import the Facebook database of e-mail addresses or phone numbers of people who will be the target of your advertising campaign . In MARKETING / Facebook / Export customer base to ads on Facebook you can use a tool thanks to which you can export data from your customer database quickly and easily.

• To generate a list of email addresses and phone numbers, first you have to activate a tool which will create a CSV data file for the first time, and then it will update it once a day.
• In the information window of the generated file you will find information about the number of exported data, the date of file's update and the url that will allow you to download data file into your PC and import it to Facebook .