How To Sell On Facebook?

You can SELL on Facebook. Actually, Facebook is an effective channel when you know how to do it.

Selling your product or service on Facebook, a social media site, can be difficult (if you aren’t doing it right). But it can work if you have a plan and can stick to the plan consistently and persistently.

First you’ll have to get your message out to the public, especially to the people who are highly likely to buy or use your product or service. With Facebook, it is a social media platform where you can find many potential buyers.

You may want to start with get free traffic from Facebook.

People are into your content and conversations because they buy dreams, stories and magic from other people they trust.

Facebook (being the number 1 social media site) is the best place to engage people with your best content.

• How to Get Free Traffic from Facebook?
• Create a New Facebook Group
• Invite Friends from Other Places
• Join Other Facebook Members’ Groups
• How to Share in Facebook Group?
• Add New Facebook Friends
• Facebook Post Best Practices
• References

Let’s begin with free traffic. The first step is to build up free traffic from Facebook.

In places where people chat, there is always attention and traffic. You’ll start with where people can chat, and one place is in Facebook groups.

The two main ways to use groups are:

• You may join groups that are created and hosted by other group owners.
• You may create your own group.

Let’s start with creating and hosting your new Facebook group.

Now send group invitations to your Facebook friends. Mostly you’ll be tempted to send invitations to all your friends regardless of whether they care about your group or not. Don’t do that.

Carefully select the friends who are likely to care or who are suitable to join your group. Doing it this way is the long way for now, but it’ll save you time and effort when you manage this group in the long run.

The next step is to send out messages in the group. Don’t simply share anything that is completely off-topic to the main theme of the group. You should prepare for what you’re going to share with your group members.

For example, if your group is about cats, keep the topics always about dog, such as dog food, playing with a dog, walking the dog, etc.

You can make use of other people connections you have in other places, other online accounts, other social media account, etc.

Some examples are:

If you have a personal blog where you regularly write and publish articles, let your readers know about your new Facebook group. Ask them to join.

If you have people who you’ve been connecting through LinkedIn, tell them about you have recently opened a new Facebook group, and it is about a specific topic that they may be interested. Ask them to join.

If you have a website where you have been building mailing list, send out a newletter message to your list about your new Facebook group. Ask them to join. Just make sure the people in your mailing list are in the same niche as your Facebook group’s topics.

Keep digging your connections or resources. Repeat the steps by sending messages to tell them about your new group, and asking them to join.

To expand your Facebook group, you’ll definitely people other than your friends also to join. It means you’ll need to expand your connections to new friends.

Where to get new friends?

Join other Facebook groups, but only join the ones that are in your niche.

When you request to join a new that is hosted by another person on Facebook, sometimes the group lets you join right way. Some other times, the group may require you to answer a few questions, and the group owner will check your answers to the questions before letting you join. Just write your answers honestly.

Once you’re in one of other people’s groups, you can start getting to know the people in there by engaging in their messages, comments, and conversations on a daily basis.

Don’t be pushy and tell them about your new Facebook group right away. Don’t even try to copy and paste the URL link of your Facebook group on other Facebook groups.

It takes time to engage, have conversations and finally make friends. Only when the timing and opportunity are right, then tell them about your group. If they show interest, then it’s right time to pull them into your Facebook group.

In your Facebook group, you first have to make a plan on exactly what content to share. Some examples are:

• Share the industry news in your niche.
• Share one of the “know-how” knowledge in your niche that people may want to know about.
• If you have a blog, take some of the topics from it. Rewrite it, or rephrase it as a question that members in your group may be curious about. Prepare for the answers. Come back at a later time show the answers.

I’ve seen in some Facebook groups where people are too eager to send out posts and share with their group members. And the messages contain hard sell pitches including “This product has a discount. So buy it now”, “Buy this XYZ, because it’s right for you”.

Your objective in Facebook groups is to “sell”, but don’t over-do it. Otherwise, you’re risking to make your members or other groups’ members annoyed by your pushy messages.

What you may do to make “selling on Facebook” more smooth is that you should first test the response. To test, start sending out some information that is related to your product, or may be useful to those members.

An example of doing this is mention the “problem”, and then “ask a question that is related to the problem”. Some members may start liking it, and some others may comment on it. The key is to get members to participate in the conversations.

After someone has commented, go back and continue the conversation. Make sure you reply to all the people who require a response from you.

At some point later, you’ll get your opportunities to connect with them as Facebook friends. That’s the moment when the selling part starts.

On Facebook, you should remember one tactic is to regularly add new friends.

But remember, only add new friends when they’re in the same niche as yours, or they are most probably going to use your product in some ways.

Besides adding new friends, you’ll have to be consistent and persistent when managing your group, and keeping relationships with members in other people’s groups.

In your group:

• Keep posting useful content.
• Watch how members respond to your content or messages. They may like it, they may comment on it, or they may simply ignore it.
• Respond to whoever that requires your response.

In other people’s Facebook group:

• Occasionally, post useful content.
• Watch how other people respond. Then you reply and keep up the conversations according to their responses.
• Make friends.

How would you improve the engagement rate of your Facebook posts? Try the best practices below.

• Keep the text in your post short. Preferrably, limit the text to be less than 50 characters.
• Hashtag may work well on other social media platforms, but it has been underperforming on Facebook posts. Your best option is to limit the use of hashtags on your Facebook posts.
• The format of media you share through your Facebook does matter. Videos usually get the highest engagement, and are followed by photos/images. The best is to share more videos when possible. But most people do not always have videos available to share. The next best option is to share photos. When sharing a video, do not only share the link of a Youtube video, but upload the video to your Facebook post and share.
• Include an emoji or multiple emojis in your posts. Just do not over do it by using too many emojis in a single Facebook post.
• “When to post” is a factor. Most people may post on weekdays. But most people have more spare time in weekends, and they tend to interact or engage more often with other people’s Facebook posts.

Can you sell in social media?

On Quora, I previously wrote an answer to a similar question. Check it out.

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