There is little to no doubt that you have a Facebook account for your online business. (If you don’t, call a social media agency now!) That’s great, of course. Being on Facebook alone is one big step for your Internet marketing campaign. If you and your social media agency are looking for more ways to maximize your presence on Facebook, how about integrating it to your website? It’s easy, it’s free and it adds a whole new dimension to what would otherwise be an ordinary e-commerce website.
Before we delve into recommended Facebook plug-ins, let us assure you that Facebook integration is not just a fad, it actually works. You can even ask your social media agency about it. There are many marketing studies which show that integrating a website to the social networking site actually boosts web traffic to the website itself and to the pages.
Here are five Facebook plug-ins that you and your social media agency might want to consider for your e-commerce website.
1. Like Button. This is probably Facebook’s most popular button. Having this on your website allows users to share pages from your site back to their own Facebook profiles—all in one click. It’s a great way to direct traffic to specific products on your website that would otherwise have been ignored. Talk to your social media agency about incorporating the Like button on every page and product on your site. You will soon find that just one click on the Like button can cause a chain reaction of awareness on a product.
2. Send Button. This button allows your site visitors to easily send content to their friends on Facebook. As compared to the Like button, the Send button communicates the message via a private message and not through the public news feed. For example, if you have an online fashion store, you might want to consider placing a Send button in addition to the Like button, in case your visitor wants to share the product or page to a friend.
3. Comments. If your website is not built on top of content management system (CMS), the Comments plug-in will be very useful for you. This plug-in is ideal for your product pages. It allows you to get direct feedback and you can even respond right away. Additionally, it eliminates the need for you and your social media agency to set up an entirely new comments solution for your website.
4. Activity Feed. The Facebook Activity Feed plug-in lets your site visitors see what their Facebook friends are doing on your sites via the Like and Comments buttons. The tricky part about this plug-in is that it only becomes really useful if your website has heavy traffic and your visitors are actively liking and commenting on your pages.
5. Recommendations. This plug-in allows you to give your site visitors personalized suggestions for pages they might be interested in. The recommendations are automatically created and compiled by the plug-in based on data from the most common activity or pages visited on your site. If the user is logged on to their Facebook account, the plug-in also takes into consideration the activity by that user’s friends. Like the Activity Feed, this plug-in is only best used if your site has heavy traffic. Otherwise, it can do more harm than good so use it sparingly.
Come back tomorrow for the second part of this post. And let us know what you think!