Should Your E-Commerce Brand Have an Organic Facebook Presence?
Ever Wonder If Having an Organic Facebook Presence Is Worth It?
If you’ve wondered whether having an organic Facebook presence is worth it for your e-commerce brand, you’ve come to the right place.
Just the Organic Facebook Presence Facts, Ma’am
Here are some basic definitions connected with the concept of organic Facebook presence.
What is an organic Facebook presence? It begins with your e-commerce brand’s Facebook business page. Its success will depend on how you use that business page.
Your e-commerce brand’s Facebook page typically contains your organic (unpaid) posts. Those posts can be a wide variety of types, including memes, business news, new or existing product news, chatty or informative content, video, gifs, giveaways, promos of all kinds, specials, and deals. The only limit is your imagination.
Your organic Facebook reach equals the number of people who see those organic posts. Those people, hopefully, like them enough to share them with their Facebook friends. Then, hopefully, a percentage of their Facebook friends share those posts with their Facebook friends. That process is like expanding ripples in a pond. The farther the ripple expands, the greater the reach. Given the overall size of Facebook’s audience, your little pond can create a huge ripple effect no matter how specialized your brand.
Your organic Facebook presence goals can fall into multiple categories. Your unique e-commerce brand and strategic goals will define your organic Facebook presence goals.
The Elephant In the Room: Has Organic Facebook Success Become Harder?
Let’s get this smelly elephant out of the rumor living room before we go any farther. Its name is periodic algorithm changes.
Let’s look at this elephant realistically.
Typically, Facebook’s algorithm changes only affect legitimate content in a minor way at most. That means only minor content tweaks have to be made at most. Instead, algorithm changes are designed to catch large misuses and often illegal issues.
If you adjust to the rules as they change, your organic Facebook presence can continue to be successful.
If you ignore those rule changes, it may be challenging to succeed over time as they continue to change.
This quote about organic Facebook content algorithms inadvertently points out enormous opportunities for e-commerce brands with an organic Facebook presence.
“First, the volume is enormous. More than 2 billion people around the world use Facebook. For each of those people, there are more than a thousand “candidate” posts (or posts that could potentially appear in that person’s feed). We are now talking about trillions of posts across all the people on Facebook…Now consider that for each person on Facebook, there are thousands of signals that we need to evaluate to determine what that person might find most relevant. So we have trillions of posts and thousands of signals — and we need to predict what each of those people wants to see in their feed instantly.” Tech at Meta “How Does News Feed Predict What You Want to See?”
Your e-commerce brand’s Facebook organic presence can thrive, even with algorithm changes, by playing by the rules.
How Can My E-Commerce Brand Have a Successful Organic Facebook Presence?
Ensure your organic Facebook presence reflects your e-commerce brand and your company voice, and is targeted to your tribe (your target audience and brand buyer personas who use Facebook).
Why? The 2 billion people in the world using Facebook are a vast sea to get lost in if you don’t target the right people.
Ensure your organic presence appeals first to those who already love your brand and will become influencers for it and second to people your research shows will love it as soon as they find it. Both are your tribe and your target audience.
The first group will help bring the second group to you over time. Those who know and love your brand will be excited to find you on Facebook, “follow” your page, comment on your posts, share your posts, and attract their friends who will love your brand.
After all, we know people trust their friends far more than any ad or company about its products. That alone can help your e-commerce brand become more successful.
But How Do You Set Up a Successful Organic Facebook Presence?
Our tips can help you set up your organic Facebook presence.
If you already have an organic Facebook presence but are not doing as well as you’d like, use our tips to refresh it by offering enticements to get your followers interested again.
Tips for a Successful Organic Facebook Presence
Keep it Real and Honest
People on Facebook want real thoughts and genuine content.
Caution: They do not react well to hype. The result is that people on Facebook may share hype but crucify your brand.
They do react well to appropriate fun and inspiration.
Values and Integrity Count
Your organic Facebook presence is the perfect place to showcase your values and the good you do in the world.
Caution: People on Facebook easily pick apart spurious claims or if someone even seems to try to pull the wool over their eyes. That will bring you the wrong kind of attention.
You’re Building Your Community, a.k.a. Use Content That Sparks Discussion and Conversation
If you know your target audience in-depth, you can start conversations with them or ask them questions they’ll love to participate in.
Caution: Being present and participating in those conversations is crucial to making them work.
Think of these people as essential to your brand’s life because they are.
Monitor Your Organic Facebook Presence
Monitoring is vital to success for several reasons:
- Your customers and potential customers will ask questions and expect someone to answer them quickly.
- They don’t realize you don’t live 24/7 on Facebook. They expect an almost immediate response. Whether that’s a realistic expectation doesn’t even enter their heads.
- Trolls, potential competitive spies, and possibly hackers will find their way onto your organic Facebook presence. Without good monitoring, they can wreak havoc very quickly by trying to undermine your brand or by commenting in such a horrible way that it causes others to stop following your brand.
- Some troll comments have nothing to do with your brand but are so abusive and hateful that they cause people to unfollow you to escape the nastiness.
- We all wish destructive people weren’t on social media, but they are. How you handle their interruptions has to be a uniform policy.
Use All Kinds of Sharable Media
Use written content, photos, memes, graphics, gifs, and videos. Make it interesting and appropriately fun. Facebook has several ways to share videos that can significantly expand who sees your video content.
In addition to staying in touch with their friends no matter where they are, people love to share: fun things; things that are important to them; and things they’ve found that worked for them, like your brand and its products.
You can provide sharable content in any or all categories as part of your organic Facebook presence.
Share Appropriate User-Generated Content
When you share it, tag that person. Not only will that let the person know you shared their content, but it does two other important things:
It shares that appealing social proof with all of their friends while showing your brand as the source, so your brand gets more exposure and more validation; and
It shares content on your page that’s far more appealing to the rest of your followers because it’s social proof from a follower and fan instead of from the company.
Work with Influencers to Provide Special Offers or Giveaways
Influencer videos on Facebook are common now. Pairing with an influencer for static media or video and a giveaway will increase your e-commerce brand’s visibility and reach.
Having the influencer point their viewership to your organic Facebook giveaway link can help build more followers.
Know the Best Time to Post on Facebook
People debate a lot about whether there is a best time to post on Facebook because Facebook is worldwide. Honestly, the best time is when your target audience is on Facebook.
The graph below is based on Hubspot’s research of the best time. Please note the small percentage of marketers who called out each time slot.
The above ideas are just a few of numerous ones you can use for an effective and successful e-commerce organic Facebook presence. If you’d like additional ideas, Shopify has a Facebook marketing guide that discusses paid and organic Facebook reach.
Still Not Sure About an Organic Facebook Presence for Your E-Commerce Brand?
“But you might wonder: Can’t I just pay Facebook to get the same results?…The critical thing to remember is that paid ads are usually intended to get people in the door. You still need a consistent stream of quality organic content on Facebook to convert these viewers into believers in your brand and product…Think of your Facebook strategy like a magazine. Your paid ad is the flashy cover that draws people in and entices them to leaf through in the checkout line. Organic content is the juicy stories and scandalous articles that convince people to buy the magazine and take it home.” HootSuite, “Increasing Facebook Organic Reach: A Marketer’s Guide.”
Organic Facebook presence has changed over time, like most things in e-commerce.
It is still a vital step in moving your potential e-commerce customers farther down the funnel toward a purchasing decision. It takes your target audience from just an audience to a tribe. How? It develops rapport and a trusting relationship with them and provides social proof. In 2022, those elements are critical to getting and keeping loyal customers.
Your target audience needs a bit more to make them take the final purchasing step, which often comes through social proof. Your organic Facebook presence can help your e-commerce brand provide that social proof.
We know you have a unique vision for how you want your e-commerce brand to grow. adQuadrant’s omni-channel digital marketing specialists work with each e-commerce brand to scale their company, using the most effective means possible. When you reach out to our social media specialists and strategists, they’ll collaborate with you to create the organic Facebook presence that makes sense for your unique e-commerce brand and growth vision.
About the author: Merikay Noah has over 20 years’ experience in digital marketing. She worked with e-commerce B2C and B2B websites of all kinds, from Fortune 100s to small start-ups, at two of the top three search engines and at a Los Angeles ad agency. Her successful e-commerce book publishing website, PopcornReads.com, attracted an international audience of bookaholics for over eight years. She now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she works as a copywriter and loves to hike with her small but fierce doggy protector – Miss Lucy.