How to best use the Facebook shop option for your brand
Facebook has a new star recently launched: the Facebook shop that you can use to sell and promote your brands. If you have the Add Shop Section link on your Facebook page, you can follow these steps really easy steps to start selling products on your page.
1: Click the Add Shop Section Link
It brings up a prompt explaining what this section will allow you to do. Click the Add Shop Section button to continue.
2: Agree to Merchant’s Terms and Policies
They include important information about what you can sell on your Facebook page, how problems will be handled during the “test phase” of the Shop Section launch, return and refund policies, and other details.
3: Add Business and Payment Processing Details
Enter your business details and set up payment processing with Stripe. If you have a Stripe account already, log into that account first and then click the link to connect to an existing Stripe account. Otherwise, you’ll need to set up a Stripe account and then proceed with the following setup.
Once you’ve finished this setup, your call to action button changes to a Shop Now button, which takes page visitors to your Shop section.
Once you’ve added a shop section to your Page and added products, here are some things you can do to get more people to visit your shop section to browse your products.
4: Describe What You Sell
Next, describe what your Facebook page shop sells in 200 characters or fewer.
5: Add Products to Your Shop
Now you’re ready to add products to your shop. To do this, click the Add Products button. If you want to add more products, go to your shop and click on the Add Product block or go to your Publishing Tools and access the Shop section there.
6: Create Collections
If you have a lot of different types of products, you have the option to create collections to organize your products. This option will be shown beneath your products once you start adding them to your shop.
When you click the Add Collection button, you’re taken to the Shop section in your Publishing Tools. You’ll see a Featured Products collection already in place where you can add your best products. To add products to the Featured Products collection, click the collection and then click the Add Products button. Select which products to add to your collection and click Add. The first products in your Featured Products collection will appear above your timeline on your Facebook page.
7: Access Your Shop’s Settings
To access your shop’s settings, click on your shop’s link from your page’s menu and then click on the setting wheel icon to get the following menu options. The Manage Shop option takes you to your Publishing Tools, where you’ll find a new section for your shop. There, you can add products and product collections to group your products. The Settings option takes you to your shop’s main settings, where you can update your email address, business address, and Stripe account.
The Help option takes you to the Shop Section FAQ where you can learn more about setting up your own shop. If you choose to no longer sell products on your Facebook page, you can use the Delete Shop option.
8: Manage Your Orders
When you receive your first order, you’ll get a notification. You can review and manage your pending and completed orders in your Publishing Tools under the Shop section.
Once you close your first order notification, you’ll see a list of your pending orders. Click on an individual order to see additional details, such as the buyer’s shipping preferences and address. You can also contact the buyer if you need additional information while the order is pending or after it’s completed.You must ship the order before Stripe will process your payment. After you click on the order, click the Mark as Shipped button and enter the tracking number. Then the customer’s payment through Stripe will be processed. The order will move to pending and your inventory will be updated accordingly.
What you can do to bring more awareness to your shop
Share your products on your timeline
When you share your shop’s products on your Page’s timeline or your personal timeline, it’s easy for people who are already connected with your business and you to see your products. To do this:
- Click the product you want to share.
- Click Share
- Choose where and how you want to share it through the dropdowns at the top. Optionally, add text to the post to make it more engaging
- Click the Share button at the bottom right
Share your shop link with your customers
You can share your shop link with your customers online and offline to encourage people to visit your shop section. To do this:
- Click the shop section on your Page
- Click the
button - Click Copy Direct Link
- Share the link with people you want to visit the shop section on your Page
How to attract new, relevant consumers to your business online
Having your own business is like having a baby. It’s the best out there, the most beautiful and interesting and you wish everybody would see it and picture it in their minds as you do. But how do you actually get to that point? The first and most important step would be investing in increasing your company’s online visibility, through its website and social media accounts. You must take into account that the competition out there is very strong and it’s only getting stronger, so make sure you are always a step ahead of your competition. Easy to say, but hard to accomplish it, isn’t it?
Well, here are some elements that you should most definitely must keep an eye on and work on every day:
The traffic. While it’s not the only attribute that will help you see your profits increase, is very important for turning curious visitors into paying customers. If you cannot keep a steady stream of visitors coming to your website on a daily basis, the chances that your company and its products will remain successful becomes much less likely. An absence of new visitors can lead to little or no growth in sales and, ultimately, a decline in profits.
source: colourbox
Unique visitors, new customers and people who visit your site regularly are all of equal importance. Each one of these groups is responsible for supporting your business and keeping it afloat. The more consumer groups you can bring in, the more likely word of your company and its products will seep into various social groups, extending your influence in your industry further.
Always keep in mind you have a brand reputation to sustain, one that will be kept while having good products and a smooth client service operation. When people associate your company’s name and image with an industry or product as a whole, you know that your reputation and reception in the marketplace is in a healthy state. Additionally, a strong brand reputation helps a company’s website stand apart from competitors in the same industry.
Make sure that your content has its right place in the search engines. Invest in good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that will take your products and brand to the right target. “Digging through search engine result pages and on-site links to find an appropriate company can be frustrating and time-consuming for the average person. Thankfully, SEO provides the perfect tool for helping to ensure your future customers never search in vain for your product,” said the Ballantine specialists. More pieces of advice from them you can read here.
Build long term continuous connections with your consumer base through social media marketing, testimonials, recommendations, guest posting and online PR.
Create relevant content that provides valuable information to the consumers, while inviting them to visit your website for your valuable services. Content helps businesses generate more search engine results, offers a connection between consumers and brands, delivers valuable information that may not otherwise have the opportunity to be shared and strengthens overall brand awareness. Additionally, content helps to keep brands and businesses relevant. All of these efforts, especially when they are combined, will help generate customer attention while also leading more clicks to your website.
Share the content as much as you can on relevant platforms. It’s not enough to create and have a great content on your website. You must be able to share it and help it reach the right people.
Partner up with other businesses that think like you, from other categories. “The key is to identify the right partners for your unique business that cater to the same target market you do, then work together to support each other in gaining visibility and sales among each other’s customers. To maximize your efforts, aim to create more long-term partnerships versus one time experiences. This can help both sides of the partnership in gaining customer attention, sales and overall success,” explains Nicole Leinbach-Reyhle for Forbes.
Connect on LinkedIn groups. They are a great way for quickly connecting with others in your industry or niche to help spread your message, you can add value to a conversation or discussion before trying to drop your links. LinkedIn groups are also a great way of contacting people who you might not have mutual connections with. You can message any other member in the group without being connected, which can become a huge asset depending on the particular circumstances. Share updates often in the group, and be sure to stay in the spotlight without oversharing.
Offer a free product or service to customers. According to entrepreneur.com, studies have confirmed that people are more likely to accept something for free than they are to pay a nominal price for it. So, why not providing a free service or product to your customers? “Maybe you offer a free 15-minute consultation or an entry-level product that you want to give away. Whatever you offer, be sure to secure the customer’s contact details so you can get in touch with them later. If you’re giving away a service for free, you have an opportunity right then to upsell those customers to your paid services. People are more likely to feel like they owe you when they accept something for free as well,” shows entrepreneur.com.
Use business listing sites like Yahoo Local and Google Local. If you’re running a local business and looking to attract nearby customers to a brick-and-mortar location or offering some professional service that’s geographically-specific, you should list your business on local business listing sites such as Yahoo Local and Google Local. Google Local is an especially powerful way to list and verify your business information, providing public details such as your company’s address for Google Maps appearances, store hours and other information related to your business. Ensure that you keep this information accurate and up-to-date. More ideas from them you can find here.
Moreover, in order to make sure you actually have the right new people coming to your place, you must identify your buyer personas, develop a persona-driven keyword strategy and then appeal to social media tools and services.
What makes a video viral?
Creating a successful viral campaign is every marketer’s dream nowadays and many agencies aspire to the idea of creating a video that will have a huge impact on the target and will get shared fast and, therefore, create a big buzz around it. But what is a viral video and how hard is to reach that goal? According to the definition on techopedia, a viral video is any clip of animation or film that is spread rapidly through online sharing. Viral videos can receive millions of views as they are shared on social media sites, reposted to blogs, sent in emails and so on. Most viral videos contain humor and fall into three broad categories:
- Unintentional Viral Videos: Videos that the creators never intended to go viral. These videos may have been posted by the creator or shared with friends, who then spread the content.
- Humorous Viral Videos: Videos that have been created specifically to entertain people. If a video is funny enough, it will spread.
- Promotional Viral videos: Videos that are designed to go viral with a marketing message to raise brand awareness. Promotional viral videos fall under viral marketing practices.
When it comes to the formula of creating a viral, it hasn’t been determined or shared yet, leaving us thinking that some of the success it has to do with luck and that most things actually go viral by accident. Very few people have mastered the art of creating viral content on purpose. What is for sure known is that it has to appeal to the target’s emotions, no matter their type (happiness, sadness, anger, joy, love, etc).
“Viral videos are the talk of the town—garnering coverage on popular blogs, rising to the top of sites like Reddit, being Tweeted and posted to Facebook, and even covered on the evening news,” wrote Megan O’Neill for AdWeek.
“There’s no specific number of shares, likes, retweets, reblogs, or whatever another measure of interaction needed to be reached in order for it to claim “viral” status. On YouTube, lots of videos get tens of thousands of views now shortly after being uploaded, but many people wouldn’t say that’s enough to consider it viral. Back in the day, however, when YouTube was much smaller and there weren’t as many users uploading videos, tens of thousands of views may have counted as <<going viral>>,” said Elise Moreau for Lifewire.
Moreover, advanced technology and platform design have made it way too easy to share things with our friends and followers, making the perfect environment for a ripple effect to occur on all levels of social media with the perfect piece of shareable content. All it takes is a few shares and the right audience to trigger an avalanche of sharing across the internet. It’s not easy to start a viral movement, but when it does happen, it can take the most regular people and turn them into internet celebrities practically overnight if it’s powerful enough.
According to Jonah Berger, marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On”, quoted by entrepreneur.com, visceral response is what separates viral breakouts from busts. Berger has spent years investigating the mechanics behind virality, identifying six key drivers under the acronym STEPPS. They are Social Currency (e.g., sharing things that make people look good), Triggers (acknowledging that we talk about things that are top-of-mind), Emotion, Public (imitating what we see others do), Practical Value (news people can use) and Stories (information passed along under the guise of idle chitchat). “Each [driver] is a research-tested principle that increases the likelihood that people will talk about and share things, that brands get word-of-mouth, that services get shared and that videos get passed along the internet,” Berger explains. “We can reliably say that including certain characteristics and messages will increase the number of people who share [content] and the likelihood it will be shared.”
6 Big Instagram 2017 Trends Any Marketer Should Know
User-friendly and making the most of one of people’s favorite activity related to owning a smartphone: taking pictures, Instagram becomes steady and sure one of the Romanians main used social media tools, especially among the trendy persons. Brands are also starting to notice its impact and are taking advantage of this positive trend.
According to Zelist Monitor, quoted by instagramology.ro, 2017 started with a performance on the Romanian market: 50,518 more users in January 2017 compared to December 2016. This is the biggest growth from December to January stated in Romania so far, the predictions for February being that the total number will reach half a million users.
In this context, marketers should make sure they know the biggest 6 trends happening out-there and be ready to adopt them as fast as possible. They might fly as easily as they arrived.
- Using Trends To Get Noticed
Being aware of the latest trends can give the marketers insights into what people are looking for on Instagram. In fact, a lot of trends can be determined by doing hashtag research and finding popular content. According to sproutsocial.com, as a business, you want to be seen in some of the most popular places on Instagram. By paying attention to the latest Instagram trends, you can help get your content noticed and in front of more eyes. Branding is all about building your audience and increasing awareness about you.
- Instagram Stories
Launched in August 2017, stories aims to change the way people use Instagram. Stories allows you to tag people in updates, add a link to your content (useful for brands directing people to their site), and it even supports Boomerang.
- Instagram Direct
It’s all about fast connection to your consumers. Last year Instagram updated Direct, the messaging side of the photo-sharing app. Since then, user numbers worldwide have grown from 80 million to 300 million. With numbers like that, it’s no wonder Instagram will continue to improve this part of the service to encourage people to use the app more.
4. Instagram Shopping
Recently, Instagram trialed shoppable product tags with 20 fashion brands, allowing the tagging of certain items in a photo. This presents a much more seamless shopping experience for the user. Rather than having to find a link in the bio, users will be able to click a tag for a detailed view of the product. The shopper can then continue researching the product without leaving the app. If the user wants to continue with the purchase, a Shop Now button will take them to the product landing page on the businesses website.
- Instagram Business Tools
The new feature allows accounts to be verified as a business account for the first time. Therefore, the marketers can add contact methods, directions to their business and unlocks access to promoted posts and analytics. Moreover, Insights on Instagram allows businesses to uncover details about their followers, such as behavior and demographics. Better knowing your customer means better business and a prolong success.
- Video is still the king of the game
According to wersm.com, One of 2017’s buzzwords is video; and video content, whether pre-recorded or live, should be leveraged by social media marketers in the next year. Instagram itself says that video will account to 75% of data in the next four years, so brands need to learn how to effectively create it and use it. The many tools that Instagram offers, have lead to the democratization of video creation, so everyone has the ability to create engaging content with little or no budget.
