As Facebook continues to expand and develop the reach of social media across the world, the development team is making it easier and easier to customise a business’ Facebook page tailored to its specific offerings. The development apps in Facebook now allow a greater freedom for your business to develop its ecommerce strategy and digital marketing offering, with even more interactive features than ever before. A business Facebook page no longer needs to remain static with usual social updates. Businesses can now make social media their own, but some businesses are too afraid to make the leap from social media to social revolution. Outside of a strong search engine marketing strategy, this could be a huge and untapped resource for any brand wanting to solidify conversions and drive more intelligent traffic to the website.
Social shopping
Facebook development is seeing a growth boom at the moment and improvements are being made all the time. Integrating these innovative features into a business page allows you to create richer content within the social sphere and open up their offers or deals to active users within the Facebook page. Adding content like this – unique content is preferable – gives the active users a more comprehensive experience in using the Facebook page. Facebook pages are social communities where fans or customers can interact and discuss your brand. They are also a community where you can interact and engage with your customers on a regular basis. Businesses who integrate their offers and products into their pages are on a strong footing for encouraging more traffic to the website and encouraging purchases through an immediate and time-restricted offer.
Using these social elements is becoming quite popular within the fashion and cosmetics industries, as brands are trying new ways to engage with their customer base and target them with offers.
The Uniqlo clothing brand has several apps within its Uniqlo UK page on Facebook and each one is targeted in a different way. The first app is a digital marketing (e-newsletter) sign-up app – not as grabby as you might think, though. Although it’s encouraging people to add themselves to the database for direct digital marketing, it also incentivises the sign-up by offering a £5 discount voucher for opting to receive the e-shots. This £5 discount voucher could mean that your delivery is free of charge; whichever way you look at it, you’re getting money off for giving them your email. That’s a pretty good deal.
Uniqlo UK has also created a competition app that asks you to create a Uniqlo Christmas wish-list. Each week, the brand chooses a winner and sends them their entire wish-list. This seasonal offering has great sharing potential, encourages participation and encourages them to look through the products on the website to choose their wish-list. Great interaction and it is a great ‘surprise and delight’ for customers at Christmas.
Facebook apps are a great leap forward for ecommerce and targeted offerings. Having them directly integrated into the Facebook page gets a higher level of interaction as users participate in a comfortable environment. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as a result of the forthcoming timeline feature. There could be bright blue days ahead for social media shopping and I’ll be keeping an excited eye out for the future.
Paul
