About

Some time ago the urgency of being online was backed up by the sense of invisibility for the people that started to adopt Internet as the way to find professionals and shops. So if you wasn’t online you started to feel like non-existent for them. And in fact it is.

Nowadays, if you are not in Facebook it happens something very similar. So the Facebook fever started not so long ago. but does Facebook will help your e-Commerce?

My answer is that it depends on how seriously you take your Facebook presence. Like it or not, Facebook became a neighborhood where people started to live their online life. Indeed some even stopped using E-mail, and instead they are using only Facebook for communications. The most common mistake is to minimize its importance and to think “we need to have a group just to have fans”, and then you don’t really take care of the group. So finally nothing really happen in the group, and if people start to complain there you will discover it several days after when the bomb might be near to explode. This happened to Amazon (the story) and in a short period of time the Amazon group exploded when gay/lesbian books disappeared from the listings, and two new groups boycotting Amazon joined almost 5000 people (Group 1, Group 2). So that’s the power of “viral marketing”, it is powerful for good but also for bad. If you visit the official Amazon Page in Facebook you will find people that comment positively and some of them negatively. If you’re out of the loop you will miss the chance to reply publicly, leaving the gap empty. That’s not good for your business. Even though Amazon have a really big number of users only 30 thousands are actually fans. That’s a low number for such a big e-Commerce site. They are not doing the right thing.

So when going to Facebook:

1. Assign a team of people to take care of the page or group daily (even weekends)
2. Be creative presenting special Facebook offers and tell web site visitors to become fans to get them.
3. Create special content for facebook (reviews, videos, pictures)
4. Humanize the page presenting employees, or inner stories that can help to show your work environment in a positive way
5. Don’t connect your corporate blog with facebook using its blog import feature, instead share each article in your wall, otherwise people read the full article in Facebook taking traffic to your site
6. Don’t let the page slow down, keep it moving, so create a set of contents, offers, etc., and publish them regularly.
7. Push your news. Remember your wall publications does not alert fans by email, so don’t abuse with the mass mail feature but use it at least once a week to communicate what happened and what is going to next week.
8. Share the good news! if you reach an objective, if you add new people to your staff, if opened a new office or store, if you have happy customers stories in your web site… share them all! (but don’t publish so many that your fan publications goes quickly to page 2).
9. Ask for comments. Fans comments are shared in their own wall and viewed by their friends, so publish some give aways only for those that reply to the offer with a comment. That will give you more viral exposition in more users walls.
10. Really take care of angry people. If you manage those situation in a very professional way right in your page that will enhance your trustworthiness. For this you need to be quick, don’t let the wheel roll much, otherwise a small snowball can become an avalanche of negative comments.

Remember that Facebook is a great chance to know your customers in a very humanized way, so if you get in touch with them, you have the chance for example to send them a happy birthday message in their wall, and even to give a birthday 24hs discount. For this you need to add them as friends. So you can even ask in your web forms “Are you in Facebook? We want to be friends, do you want to leave us your Facebook E-mail?”

Hope this can help you.

So remember: take Facebook presence very seriously, be fun, be creative, see the human side of your customers, and use it for feedback.