Companies are always looking for new ways to generate leads and increase traffic to their website. These targets are pivotal to reaching the main goal of every company: the highest revenue possible. Why should businesses only use their main website for commerce transactions? A lot are turning to Facebook as a new commerce platform to differentiate themselves from the competition. But will it work? And what do we know about Facebook commerce already?
Facebook commerce: The hard facts
– Facebook has 850 million users worldwide (1/8 of the world’s population)
– Facebook’s average user has 130 friends and likes 80 pages / groups
– The average user posts 90 pieces of content per month
– Large brands receive roughly 11% of their website traffic from Facebook
– Users spend an average of 700 million minutes on the social network (Source: Facebook)
These stats simply show that more people are spending more time on Facebook than anywhere else so why not try and sell to them while they’re on your page? You’d be silly not to.
There are a few different ways in which your Facebook page can support F-commerce: You can either have tabs that redirect to your main website or you can support real-money shopping right on the page. Real-money shopping on Facebook can either be done through iFrames or complete selling on Facebook. iFrames basically allow businesses to create and host their own content and to display it in the 520-pixel middle column of a Facebook Page.
There is something quite neat about the fact that you can sell your product through Facebook and also have a Hubspot form attached to capture the leads. You essentially (and hypothetically) don’t need to have anything other than your Facebook page – you can sell your product, engage with your users, communicate openly with them and generate leads at the same time.
A lot of people seem to be questioning whether Facebook commerce is just a fad or if it is actually around to stay. This is where the dilemma lies: do you steal a march over your competitors and start running f-commerce before them or wait until it’s clear that f-commerce is here to stay and lose ground on the early adopters?
There will be a few hurdles for companies who want to adopt f-commerce to get over, including Facebook advertising and social trends. A lot of people within the social media industry see Facebook as a platform for solely conversing with friends and not one to do shopping through. That being said, a JWT study found that 48% of people aged 20-33 would like to see the places where they shop give them the ability to buy directly on Facebook.
It would be worth investing a few hours of your time integrating a platform such as Payvment (correct spelling) to your Facebook page (it’s free!) and trying out f-commerce for a few months. If your audience like it and you can use it correctly to produce leads, then it might be one of the most undervalued commerce tools of the year.
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