5 Tips for Selling Products on Facebook

Terms like social commerce, Facebook commerce and social shopping are making headlines. Nearly every retailer is trying tap into the 750 million potential shoppers on Facebook. The one thing missing is what it really means to make your e-commerce efforts social.

That's because social commerce is more than just putting up a Facebook storefront and adding a “Like” button to your products. To truly fulfill the promise of social commerce, you need to take full advantage of the Facebook ecosystem. This means enabling social promotion and discovery of products based on a consumer's social graph — i.e., what their friends and similar people like. It also means integrating conversation into the shopping experience, allowing shoppers to interact directly with your reps and ask questions about products just as they would at a physical store location.

Of course, social commerce creates an unparalleled opportunity to combine social data with traditional e-commerce analytics to better understand your customers. Here are five ways to take your social commerce efforts to the next level:

1. Make your Facebook store your default tab. Sales and marketing experts know that extra clicks and steps create unnecessary barriers in the customer experience. By setting your store page as your default tab, you're removing the barrier of an additional click on the store tab. This allows visitors to immediately see your store instead of having to go through an extra step, helping your fans convert to shoppers more easily.

Don’t forget to rename the tab. "Store" or "Shop" doesn’t really call people to the desired action. Naming the tab with action words and specifics like “Buy T-Shirts” or “Shop for Puzzles” will lead to more engagement and interest.

2. Enable social discovery. Putting a like or share button on each product is a good first step. But once someone likes or shares your product and it posts to their feed, it's gone after five minutes. Build some persistence into this valuable shopper feedback by storing this data and using it to fuel recommendations, both based on what their friends like and what people with similar taste profiles like.