- Offer Exclusive Content to People Who "Like" You on Facebook
Offering premium content to people who like your page is a staple of Facebook ecommerce. It quickly connects people to your account, and allows them to get frequent updates and offers that might nudge them into buying.
Recently, there has been a surge in businesses offering special deals and a link to their official site. They offer freebies, samples, coupon codes, and other special offers. This is a social way of attracting attention.
Freebie sites and deal watchers will often notice the offer, and then let people on their subscription lists know about it. This draws in many people, who then like your page and initiate a relationship with your brand. This approach seems to be working so far.
- Add a Store Tab
Earlier you could only promote yourself on Facebook. Now, you can actually sell through it. Adding a storefront tab on your official page does this.
Many small businesses are beginning to take advantage of this. It is a cheap way of providing an independent, secondary, web store. An aspect about Facebook that facilitates this is that it works beautifully for customer communication.
To get started, all you need is a store platform. These are a dime a dozen these days, and I haven't seen a whole lot of difference between them. They all offer similar features, similar prices, and similar support. Since the design for storefronts is so basic at Facebook's end, you can pretty much pick any one of them, and have a positive experience.
Do Not Depend Only on Facebook to Get You Social -- Add Share Buttons to Your Ecommerce Site Too
You should focus on socializing your primary ecommerce website as well. Which means adding social sharing buttons to each page to make it easier for customers to share what they enjoy. Each product page should have a Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and possibly a Pinterest button.
There also needs to be a section on your site's homepage that invites people to like your Facebook account. Tell them they can find information, new releases, and special offers there. Once they like that page, or any product page on your official site, it will show in their activity feed. Their entire network of friends can view this.
Don't Forget the SEO
Just because it is a Facebook page does not mean that you do not care if people land there from search engines. You do have to draw people to your page. When customers search for you, or a product you sell, you want your Facebook page to figure in the list of search results. To make this work, you need to follow the general ecommerce SEO best practices.
Because status updates are ever-changing, they may not always be of help in establishing a theme for your page, that Google will identify you with. Instead, you should focus on enriching content written in the About Me and other description sections of the profile. Do not worry about outdated concepts such as keyword density, but compose your SEO copywriting in a way that helps you win the LSI battle.
You should also use the vanity URL Facebook provides to state your business name. Let's say your name was "Some Business." You would make that your vanity URL name, as well as your business page's name. So the URL of your Facebook page would become www.facebook.com/somebusiness.
Conclusion
Facebook seems to be making a conscious effort to become a favorable ecommerce destination. In addition, its humungous user base is very attractive. If you are not already active on Facebook, you need to be.
