﻿Facebook used to dominate the social media space back in the 2010s as one
of the main online hangouts for young people. And with 1.6B log-ins daily,
Facebook is still in the race. However, for years now, the use of Facebook has been declining,
and newer, hipper social media apps are taking over (looking at you, TikTok). So
why am I talking about Facebook today and what good could it bring to your business in 2023?
Although in the past decade Facebook has gone through several scandals and a steep dive in
engagement, the remainder of its users are still actively using the platform. What are they doing
there? How old is Facebooks’ audience? And are they open to support and buy from your
business? As of September 2022, 42% of Facebook users are aged 18-34. And believe it or not,
Facebook is the most popular social commerce platform among digital buyers in the US this year.
Do these people care about businesses on Facebook? The answer is yes—75% of Facebook users visit a
local business page at least once a week. To answer the main question—is Facebook Shop
right for your business? Yes, but… Only if you already have a Facebook page that gets
steady traffic and continuous engagement. But if you’re just now thinking about creating a
page on Facebook or your current page doesn’t have much engagement, Facebook might not be the best
place to market and sell your products. Facebook’s algorithm has changed in the past few years,
and it’s not in the favor of new businesses. In 2012, organic reach for new business pages was
only about 16%. Right now, it’s estimated that less than 2% of followers can actually see posts
made by a new business page. This means you can either invest in Facebook ads or pivot your focus
to a different platform, for example, Instagram. We have a video covering just this topic.
You might be wondering how the process of selling Printful products on Facebook
works. Let’s quickly go over this together. Once you’ve set up your shop on Facebook’s end,
you’ll need to connect it to your ecommerce platform. Facebook Shop integrates with Shopify,
Ecwid, WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce.
To learn how to open a Facebook Shop, take a look at Facebook’s help page. This process is fairly
simple and takes no more than 15 minutes. Once that’s taken care of, you have to
create a product catalog and connect your ecommerce platform to your Facebook Shop.
Head over to the Facebook Commerce Manager and click +Add Catalogue. Select ecommerce
as your catalog type, then click Next. Here, you can choose how you want to upload
items to your catalog. Facebook Shop gives you two options: manually upload or connect your
catalog from a partner platform. Because you’re an ecommerce seller, choose Connect a partner
platform and pick the ecommerce platform that you’re using for your store.
The next step is setting up your product catalog on Facebook Shop.
Go over to your Facebook Commerce Manager, then click Catalog and Items.
There, you’ll have the option to add one or multiple new items to the store.
You can add items to your shop manually, with the data feed, or with Pixel. How you add products
depends on your ecommerce site. I suggest you learn more by taking a look at the resources
provided by your ecommerce platform. Just in case, I’ve also included them in the description.
Let’s take a look at some marketing strategies you can use on your Facebook Shop in 2023.
Facebook Shop is like your brand’s digital storefront, allowing customers to browse
products right on your Facebook Page. To make sure you get the most out of your Facebook Shop,
work on your product descriptions and visuals. Your product catalog is a space that holds
information about all your products. The more detailed your descriptions and visuals are,
the better the shopping experience will be for your customers. Thorough,
thought-out descriptions and engaging product photos (and even videos) are a must if you want
to gain people’s trust. Make sure your product catalog looks professional and trustworthy.
To ensure your product photos look their best,
you can look at Facebook’s recommendations by clicking the link in the description.
Just like with any other social media, your post competes with many others in a
sea of feed updates. To make sure your content isn’t washed away unnoticed, work on engaging,
bright visuals. And, when possible, post videos showing off your brand and products.
If you want to engage a wider audience on Facebook, video is the best and most
sure-fire way to do this. Like other social media platforms, Facebook is built to keep your
thumb busy scrolling. Videos are the perfect content to stop scrollers in their tracks and
draw their eyes to your content. If you want to give video format a go,
take a look at this Ask Printful episode. We share our secret sauce for making cool product videos
using only your phone. If you don’t have the time or resources to film video content yourself,
we’ve prepared a free video library, with footage for both the fulfillment process and
product showcases. I’ve left a link to it in the description, so make sure to check it out later.
Last but not least, remember to adjust your marketing technique to fit Facebook’s
algorithm. The average Facebook page post sees just 0.07% organic engagement. To
increase the number of people who see your posts, you have to work with the algorithm.
According to Facebook, the feed intends to show users meaningful and informative
stories. As of 2022, the Facebook algorithm figures out if the stories are worth showing
using three main ranking indicators: Who posted it? People are more likely
to see content from sources they regularly interact with.
Type of content. Users are served with the type of content they enjoy the most. If they prefer
videos, that’s what they mostly see in their feeds. For example, if they like pictures, they’ll
be shown mostly posts containing pictures. Interactions with the post. The more engagement
the post has, the more people it’ll be shown to. So what this means is that instead of focusing on
selling your product to new audiences, focus on building a relationship
with your existing Facebook audience. The more people engage with your business page,
the more likely your products will appear in their feeds. When creating content,
think about what will motivate them to interact. There’s no one-size-fits-all suggestion because
what your audience enjoys really depends on your niche. Those could be memes, entertaining video
content, useful articles, or anything else. But what I can tell you for sure is this–no matter
what your audience is into, what they don’t want to see is a feed full of promotional posts.
Let’s take a look at the thought process behind creating engaging content. For this example,
I’ll imagine I own a brand targeted towards book lovers. One of the best parts of being
in a community that loves books is discussing your latest reads. So, to tap into that interest,
I’d create a post asking my followers to share their favorite 5-star reads. Or, I’d
share my own thoughts on a recent bestseller, and invite people to share their thoughts, too.
These types of posts help build a relationship with your customers and will increase your
engagement. And as we just learned, increased engagement leads to more exposure for your
Facebook posts and products. Are you excited to add your products
to Facebook Shop? Let me know how it goes for you in the comment section below. I’m excited
to hear from you. And remember to take a look at all the resources I’ve linked in the description,
as they’ll help you build your Facebook Shop. Okay, see you in the next video, bye-bye!