It's official, Malaysia is a Facebook country. According to comScore's report in 2013, Malaysia ranks no.14 in the world with the highest Facebook penetration.
It's official, Malaysia is a Facebook country. According to comScore's report in 2013, Malaysia ranks no.14 in the world with the highest Facebook penetration. That means there are 14.48 million Facebook users in Malaysia, close to 50% of the population.
If you are selling online locally, it will be insane to leave out Facebook as one of your media to reach out to your potential customers.
Social media experts are always talking about engagements and building long term relationship with your audience on Facebook. How about quick wins?
While we are not extreme experts on social media strategies, we would like to share our experience on getting immediate results via Facebook campaigns. We are not talking about f-commerce or f-store here, but focusing on getting traffic from your Facebook page to your e-commerce site, and deliver conversions.
We would like to stress that it is still ultimately important to constantly engage with your Facebook fans while working on some "quick wins" here.
For a start, following are our recommendations on how to leverage your Facebook page to market your online store.
Phase 1: Grow Facebook fans, you can't do anything without fans, right? Set yourself a budget and target total fans to achieve, use Facebook advertising and select "Get More Page Likes" as pictured above.
Phase 2: Use Promote Page Posts (as pictured above), this will be our focus of this article so read on...
Phase 3: Advanced Facebook marketing (not pictured above), for example retargeting on Facebook, we hope to cover this topic too in the future too.
Many are saying people use Facebook to social and interact with friends, not shopping, so it is not wise to spend your ads dollar in Facebook to achieve conversions.
Is this true? It's hard to agree but let's find out.
Is this true? To a certain extent yes. According to AllFacebook's findings, an average of 17% of your fans will actually see your post. That means the impressions are usually low, more so if your Facebook page is e-commerce oriented, unless the post is shared or going viral.
Now you know that your Facebook page post got buried under news feed for most of the time, so what should you do?
By referring to the sample as pictured above, the structure of a page post consists of:
(a) Copywriting: Just keep it short and sweet.
(b) URL: Good to use URL shorteners and tagging to measure clicks number and conversions.
(c) Image: The most important element that decides the ads performance, however this is a little tricky especially this clause from Facebook Advertising Guidelines:
Our own experiences (and others too) tell us that Facebook is pretty inconsistent in measuring the 20% rule. Therefore, the best way is try to keep text as minimal as possible, for example just displaying the discounted price.
(d) Product: Put it this way, if your product or deal is not attractive, no one is going to click on your ads. Getting click-throughs is very important to get any results from Promoted Page Posts.
Since most of the purchases via Promoted Page Posts would be impulse buying as opposed to planned (via Google searches), lower priced (below RM 100) items could potentially yield better results.
Let's check out some good examples of monster posts:
First of all, don't use the "Boost Post" feature within your post (or any other CTAs within your Facebook page), as CPM (cost per thousand impressions) will be charged rather than CPC.
Unless you have different campaign objective, it is better to pay only when some one click on your ads, right?
Therefore, always use Facebook ads create and follow the simple steps below:
(a) Select "Promote Page Post".
(b) Select page post to promote.
(c) Choose your audience (by age, gender, interests) to make your ads relevant.
(d) Click "Switch to Advanced Pricing (includes CPC)" then the section below will appear.
(e) Choose "Optimize for clicks"
(f) Choose "Manually bid for clicks" to set your maximum CPC (recommended).
There are 2 important KPIs to measure, the clicks and the conversions.
If you are not getting any clicks, that means your ads sucks (if your deal doesn't suck), try to change and optimize your copywriting and your image.
However, it is challenging to get every single ads up and performing. Just keep trying and bear in mind that only some of your promoted page posts are able to get substantial clicks. You don't pay much anyway if some of your ads are not getting clicks (if you choose CPC).
For those ads that are getting clicks, you need to measure conversions. How many orders and what conversion rates (CVR) are you getting from Promoted Page Posts?
It is recommended to use Facebook Conversion Tracking, but you can also measure the conversions using URL tagging and your web analytics tool.
Now, the big question is what CVR to achieve? According to this study, 0.75% CVR is a good benchmark for Promoted Page Posts.
It can be even better according to our own actual experience as some of our Promoted Page Posts were able to achieve more than 4% CVR! See it for yourself below a screen captured from our web analytics tool on Promoted Page Posts performance.
Facebook Page is no longer "free" for business! You were paying for growing the fans and now you need to pay to reach out to bigger audience. Do take note that Promoted Page Posts are able to reach out to non-fans, so you could grow some Facebook fans too besides getting conversions.
Nevertheless, it is important to monitor the performance and measure the ROI. Who knows, it might even perform better than your SEM (search engine marketing) campaign!
Last but not least, always remember that it is still important to engage with your Facebook fans with quality content, while you are promoting your page post.
Now, just brace yourself for the influx of PM (private message) requests!
If you are selling online locally, it will be insane to leave out Facebook as one of your media to reach out to your potential customers.
Social media experts are always talking about engagements and building long term relationship with your audience on Facebook. How about quick wins?
While we are not extreme experts on social media strategies, we would like to share our experience on getting immediate results via Facebook campaigns. We are not talking about f-commerce or f-store here, but focusing on getting traffic from your Facebook page to your e-commerce site, and deliver conversions.
We would like to stress that it is still ultimately important to constantly engage with your Facebook fans while working on some "quick wins" here.
3 phases of Facebook marketing for e-commerce
For a start, following are our recommendations on how to leverage your Facebook page to market your online store.
Phase 2: Use Promote Page Posts (as pictured above), this will be our focus of this article so read on...
Phase 3: Advanced Facebook marketing (not pictured above), for example retargeting on Facebook, we hope to cover this topic too in the future too.
2 myths of Facebook marketing for e-commerce
It is difficult to sell my products to Facebook users.
Many are saying people use Facebook to social and interact with friends, not shopping, so it is not wise to spend your ads dollar in Facebook to achieve conversions.
Is this true? It's hard to agree but let's find out.
I have 20,000 fans, but only 10-20% of my fans are seeing my post.
Is this true? To a certain extent yes. According to AllFacebook's findings, an average of 17% of your fans will actually see your post. That means the impressions are usually low, more so if your Facebook page is e-commerce oriented, unless the post is shared or going viral.
Now you know that your Facebook page post got buried under news feed for most of the time, so what should you do?
How to use Promoted Page Posts for e-commerce?
 |
| Sample Promoted Page Post, it also appears on News Feed |
Step 1: Create attractive post
By referring to the sample as pictured above, the structure of a page post consists of:
(a) Copywriting: Just keep it short and sweet.
(b) URL: Good to use URL shorteners and tagging to measure clicks number and conversions.
(c) Image: The most important element that decides the ads performance, however this is a little tricky especially this clause from Facebook Advertising Guidelines:
Ads and sponsored stories in News Feed may not include images comprised of more than 20% text.
Our own experiences (and others too) tell us that Facebook is pretty inconsistent in measuring the 20% rule. Therefore, the best way is try to keep text as minimal as possible, for example just displaying the discounted price.
Update: Thanks to Arrow from Facebook who has given us good tips on using this tool to help you detect whether your image is violating the 20% policy. According to him, the way Facebook define 20% text overlay is that – your image will be divided into 5X5 grids, as long as 20% of these 25 squares (5 of them) contains text, it violates the policy.
(d) Product: Put it this way, if your product or deal is not attractive, no one is going to click on your ads. Getting click-throughs is very important to get any results from Promoted Page Posts.
Since most of the purchases via Promoted Page Posts would be impulse buying as opposed to planned (via Google searches), lower priced (below RM 100) items could potentially yield better results.
Let's check out some good examples of monster posts:
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Step 2: Promote post
First of all, don't use the "Boost Post" feature within your post (or any other CTAs within your Facebook page), as CPM (cost per thousand impressions) will be charged rather than CPC.
 |
| Don't use Boost Post feature, as it charges by CPM! |
Unless you have different campaign objective, it is better to pay only when some one click on your ads, right?
Therefore, always use Facebook ads create and follow the simple steps below:
(a) Select "Promote Page Post".
(b) Select page post to promote.
(c) Choose your audience (by age, gender, interests) to make your ads relevant.
(d) Click "Switch to Advanced Pricing (includes CPC)" then the section below will appear.
 |
| Always good to choose manual CPC |
(e) Choose "Optimize for clicks"
(f) Choose "Manually bid for clicks" to set your maximum CPC (recommended).
Step 3: Review performance & improve
There are 2 important KPIs to measure, the clicks and the conversions.
If you are not getting any clicks, that means your ads sucks (if your deal doesn't suck), try to change and optimize your copywriting and your image.
However, it is challenging to get every single ads up and performing. Just keep trying and bear in mind that only some of your promoted page posts are able to get substantial clicks. You don't pay much anyway if some of your ads are not getting clicks (if you choose CPC).
For those ads that are getting clicks, you need to measure conversions. How many orders and what conversion rates (CVR) are you getting from Promoted Page Posts?
It is recommended to use Facebook Conversion Tracking, but you can also measure the conversions using URL tagging and your web analytics tool.
Now, the big question is what CVR to achieve? According to this study, 0.75% CVR is a good benchmark for Promoted Page Posts.
It can be even better according to our own actual experience as some of our Promoted Page Posts were able to achieve more than 4% CVR! See it for yourself below a screen captured from our web analytics tool on Promoted Page Posts performance.
 |
| Promoted Page Posts with high CVR of more than 4%! |
Conclusion
Facebook Page is no longer "free" for business! You were paying for growing the fans and now you need to pay to reach out to bigger audience. Do take note that Promoted Page Posts are able to reach out to non-fans, so you could grow some Facebook fans too besides getting conversions.
Nevertheless, it is important to monitor the performance and measure the ROI. Who knows, it might even perform better than your SEM (search engine marketing) campaign!
Last but not least, always remember that it is still important to engage with your Facebook fans with quality content, while you are promoting your page post.
Now, just brace yourself for the influx of PM (private message) requests!
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