Social Commerce and You: Guide for Facebook and Instagram

With the dawn of the digital age social media has become an almost integral part of everyone’s life. Let’s take a look at how that can help you and your business, how to sell your products on Facbook and Instagram and how to do it right!

When 77% of the population is in a marketplace, but your store isn’t.

The younger the demographic stratum, the likelier it is that they have some form of social media presence. On the other hand, eCommerce isn’t traditionally considered to be social by nature, yet it is common sense to have social profiles, even if you’re not selling anything on them, to function as a brand image propagator, news source or feedback platform.

Without Social platforms as sales channels, they nevertheless take up a significant portion of your time through updates and various social interactions. A certain crowd is attracted by your presence, but this doesn’t mean they will make the next step and go to your site to browse & shop.

If they won’t come to your store, bring your store to them!

The benefits of social sales channels

They bring your products directly to the target audience!

If you are, for instance, selling clothes & accessories, you can reach your customers by going directly to them — 77% of online women in the US use Facebook and 31% use Instagram.

Additional options to increase organic reach

Some hashtags, some correctly formatted links, and some great content and you can watch your traffic grow!

Smooth shopping experience

Extensively designed and very detail oriented sales funnels created to push the user from the landing page to the checkout are very important. BUT, through social commerce, you allow users to create their own journeys!

You can use social media to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into salespeople — Seth Godin

Shopping with Facebook

The Facebook shop is an additional tab of your Facebook business page and you can use this tab to list products you’re selling and connect with more customers.

Facebook store functionality:

• Add products and product info
• Curate your shop’s product inventory
• Communicate with customers directly from your Page to increase conversion rate
• Get Recommendations on your Page
• Receive insights (such as views or clicks) about your product listings
• Sell directly from Facebook and manage orders

Benefits of Facebook in eCommerce:

• It’s free to use!
• Customizable inventory: You can divide your products into different collections to make it easier for customers browsing your shop.
• Easy communication: Your customers can message your Shop with questions.
• Detailed insights: Depending on the type of Shop you have, you can see views, clicks, and purchases for each of your products. Moreover, you get direct data regarding a specific sales channel and a deeper understanding of the Facebook audience.
• Greater reach: You can get better distribution for your products. When you have a shop section, your products may appear in the Marketplace, allowing people to discover them. Remember that this feature is still underway and is being gradually introduced, so it may not be available to you yet.
  Furthermore, it means that your products will not be affected by the Facebook algorithm, which cuts organic reach for products when a link is added.

Tips for succeeding with Facebook:

• Make sure your posts have clear CTAs, to help direct them through the sales funnel. Posts such as “The autumn collection brings a gust of fresh air” do not encourage the users to act. In this case, even adding something as simple as “Shop the look!” can make a world of difference.
• Variety for familiarity
  1. Same copy, different pictures — having the same copy headlining different Facebook Ads breeds familiarity and conveys new information simultaneously and is a great tactic to engage people that follow your brand!
  2. Experiment with the copy — the previous point doesn’t imply remaining static — change details in your copy to find out what performs best and engages people the most.
• Optimize posts for organic reach — Facebook’s algorithm penalizes posts that have a direct link to the product page, thus decreasing organic reach. A solution to this would be to post the link in the comments.

Shopping with Instagram (product tagging)

Shopping posts and stories give people access to pricing and product details both within the Instagram feed and through the Shop button on your business profile. By tapping on a post, people can visit the website to learn more about products.

Instagram functionality:

Instagram product tagging allows users to:

• See a product description in the image
• See how much the product costs
• Click the tag and go to your website to finish the purchase or see more products

Benefits of Using Instagram For eCommerce:

• Traffic: Users who tap on the product will be redirected to the PDP, which should increase traffic from social media
• User-friendly product display: users will be able to see product data immediately, without additional interactions with the app
• Insights: you can track engagement and click through data on posts that have products tagged in them.

Tips to succeed with Instagram:

• Don’t forget hashtags! Adding hashtags expands your organic reach and also means that your product will appear when someone searches by hashtag!
• Engage! Answer questions! Give guidance! — people asking questions in the comments are literally asking to be converted, so don’t let them down by ignoring them. Furthermore, being active in communication will help improve your brand’s image.
• IG is stubborn with links in posts, so don’t forget to post them in the comments, so people know where to find the products!

Parting words

Bringing your store to social media can make a world of difference, but just like with all other sale channels, you have to do it right! However, doing it right has never been easier, and when setting up is also quick and painless, there’s no excuse not to use this avenue of sales.

What’s more, rumour has it that Instagram is developing a stand-alone app for shopping, where you’ll be able to see the products that pages you follow have up for sale. How impactful this will be is anyone’s guess, but it’s a smart move to master Social commerce (it’s really not that hard!) since traditional and social commerce is continuously converging.

Have any questions or comments? Perhaps you need some help with your social media presence? Just shoot Scandiweb’s Digital Marketing experts a message at [email protected] and we will get back to you shortly! Visit this page to learn more about our Growth Marketing services!

Related articles:

• Case Study — Adding a new sales channel, Google Shopping
• Finding the right influencers: evaluating Youtube Channels

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