Five Simple Ways To Improve Your Relationship With Your Facebook Fans

Most ecommerce stores have their own Facebook page, and behind each one is an ecommerce store owner (or employee or team of employees) whose job it is to promote their company’s presence in the social media sphere.

Whether you’re just starting out with your Facebook business page or have had one for a while, you know that gaining fans and maintaining relationships with them online can involve many things. With this in mind, here are some simple Facebook marketing tips to help you improve your Facebook presence and social engagement.

Make Facebook A Priority

Managing an ecommerce business takes time, and so does managing a Facebook profile. Many small businesses also don’t have the luxury of hiring an employee to handle their Facebook marketing and fan engagement tasks for them.

The good news is that if you are pressed for time, you don’t have to spend hours on Facebook per day.  Every day you should plan on spending about an hour to:

• Check for new posts on your wall from fans and respond to them
• Post up engaging, non-spammy status updates (more on this later)
• Check on your number of “Likes” and see who likes your page.

Of course there are many, many other things that you can and should be doing on Facebook, including taking a few minutes to see how many of your friends from your personal page “Like” your business page, and reaching out to friends who you think might be interested in doing so, but on the days when you are pressed for time, simply doing the three things above is enough.

Don’t Over-Share

Who likes constant updates from the same person or business in their newsfeed? Answer: No one. Journalists have to constantly ask themselves if a piece of information is “newsworthy” i.e. relevant and important to their audience, and you should, too. 

One to three posts a day is enough in most cases, since the goal of Facebook is really to build social relationships and encourage social interaction.  Keep in mind that this doesn’t include responding to comments—try to respond to all of the feedback left by your fans as soon as possible.

When you do update, make sure to. . .

Keep It Interesting

On Facebook, users are constantly bombarded with status updates and information. This means that in order to stand out, your updates have to be interesting and/or informative.  Promoting your business is fine, but don’t just limit your updates to commercials for your products and services. 

Think about what you can offer your fans, whether that is links to valuable content (on your site, your blog, or elsewhere) company insider information (first to be informed about sales and promotions) or simply asking your fans questions and engaging them in conversation on FB once they leave responses.

The more valuable your FB posts are to your fans, the more often they will read, comment, and take actions as a result of them, and the less likely they will be to “unlike” your page.

Try New Things

If your Facebook page is starting to look boring and dated to you, it is probably time to try some new things to keep your fans engaged. There are many apps available that can let you run Facebook promotions, add like gates that require visitors to like your page in order to access certain content, and more.

For Miva Merchant stores, our Design Department also offers Miva Merchant and Facebook integration.  See the example for All In Merchandise below:

Improve Communication

How happy are your fans with the content on your Facebook page? What about the content on your blog or the products on your site? If you don’t know, ask them for feedback, and if you get negative feedback, respond to it and offer to help or provide additional information outside of Facebook.

Remember, when it comes right down to it, social media at its core is really about social engagement.