Archive for facebook

Shopping from our Facebook Page

February 23, 2011 at 10:27 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , , ,

We have now set up a fully functional shopping page on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/puddleducks. This is of course in addition to our main shopping channel at www.puddleducks.ie. The Facebook shopping channel is fully secure and it uses PayPay to process payments. You can get to the shop by clicking the “Shop Now” prompt on the left hand side of our page.

It utilises the Payvment Application which we have found very straight forward to set up and use. The Facebook shop only displays a small subset of our products (currently 9 products) including our new kids wellies. Our full range of over 100 products continues to be available on our main website. I think this will be a useful addition to our service to customers. We will see how it develops and how busy it becomes and will add more products including any new arrivals and special offers.

A few more details and limitations:

  • You need to set up a PayPay Business Account prior to setting up the Shop
  • Setting up a product on the Payvment Application is easy. You just need to enter the name, price, description, product image and product options (size and colour)
  • The use of the Payvment Application is Free.
  • It is quite limited is terms of shipping options – therefore we are only shipping to Ireland through our Facebook shop. We ship worldwide on our ecommerce website.
  • We offer Free Shipping to Ireland from our Facebook page shop to our Facebook fans

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Selling from our Facebook Page

July 27, 2010 at 12:23 am · Filed under Customer Engagement, facebook ·Tagged , ,

Our Facebook page is up and running for well over a year now and we’re delighted to have build up a following of over 1000 fans or people who “like” the page . The page is a fun and informative way to “chat” to our existing and potential customers. We regularly run competitions, offers, discounts and post articles and links. Our Facebook fans can post their own reviews and often send us photos of the kids in their PuddleDucks gear. We love it. Overall, Facebook is definitely our social media channel of choice.

As an online retailer we are always interested in finding new ways to show off and sell our products. I recently read a piece in Practical Ecommerce about different ways of selling  your products from your Facebook page. I feel it is too early and currently too unsecure to sell directly on the Facebook page but I do feel that there is a great opportunity to “show off your wares” to your Facebook fans and route them through to your website. After doing a bit of reaseach I selected Shop Tab as the Facebook application we would use.

When installed it shows your products on a new “Shop” tab on your page. Clicking on a products takes the customer to the appropriate page on the website where the secure purchase can (hopefully!) take place.

The installation of the application is really easy. The pricing plan I selected included a free 7 day trial and a charge of $10 per month after that. You just sign up through Facebook, add your page details and then upload a CSV file of your products to ShopTab. The format of this file is defined by Shop Tab and it includes, Product Name, Description, Category, Price, Product url and Image url. Upload the file and the products appear on a new Shop tab on your Facebook page.

So far, I have only included a subset of our products on the Shop tab. More will be added more as we go along. I will also be keeping a close eye on Google Analytics to see how much extra traffic comes from our new Facebook shop window.

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Tips for increasing fans on your Facebook page

March 20, 2010 at 8:06 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , , ,

I posted the following on the discussion forum of the Facebook Page of O’Mahony-Donnelly E-business a few days ago. I thought it’s also worth reproducing here.

Here’s a few of my tips on how to get more fans to your Facebook page:

1. The most important. Create fun and interesting content for your fans. This way you will get “likes” and “comments” which will appear on your fans’ status updates and you will get their friends to be aware of your page and some will “fan” you. This way you can build up your fans in a viral manner.

2. Create giveaways and prize draws on your page – again creates interest and engagement and more fans will come your way.

3. Facebook Adverts – occasionally run a Facebook ad which will appear only on your fans profile pages. this will say e.g. Aedan is a fan of PuddleDucks – Click to become a fan. This works really well if you have a giveaway at the top of your fan page. Doesn’t cost too much and is worth it. Don’t run it all the time as it will be seen too much and will become boring. It’s easy to pause and un-pause the ad.

4. Post your most interesting Facebook updates to Twitter (maybe not all of them)

5. Link to your Facebook page from your website homepage

6. Have your Facebook page link on all your email signatures.

On last point, you should not try to get more fans just for the sake of collecting and increasing numbers but you should try to only get fans that will be interested in your product or service. Quality over Quantity!

Here’s our Facebook page.

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Free Giveaway of Ladies Jacket on Facebook

February 26, 2010 at 1:48 pm · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , ,

We’re giving away a free Ladies Jacket over on our Facebook fan page. All you need to do is leave a comment and let us know your favourite place to go with the kids in their PuddleDucks gear. 

Visit our page on Facebook now. Sign up as a fan and leave a comment.

The closing date for the draw is Saturday 27th February.

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Facebook Ads: Friends Of Connection Targeting

November 21, 2009 at 1:32 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , ,

Facebook have recently added a new way of targeting people to become a fan of your Facebook page. This is called “Friends of Connection” targeting. It means that you can create an ad that will only be displayed for Facebook users who are friends of existing fans of your page.

We have approximately 380 fans currently on the PuddleDucks fan page. Last week, I wrote a new Facebook ad requesting more users to join our page.  This is tied in with our current Facebook contest called “Name the Ducks“. This is what the ad looks like:

When setting up the ad, you now see additional criteria when selecting the ad targeting. This allows you to only show the ad to friends of the current fans of your page (as longs as you are the Admin of the page).

As well as the Friends of Connection targeting I have also filtered on our usual demographic criteria of Female and ages 28 to 45. This gives us a potential display base for the new ad of 7,120 people.

When the ad is displayed to these people, it will also be personalised. For example, say Mary Murphy is a fan of PuddleDucks. When the ad is displayed to Mary’s friends it will say “Mary Murphy is a fan of PuddleDucks” with a  “Become a Fan” prompt below.

As with all Facebook ads to get more fans to your page, you can see the stats for the number of times the ad is clicked as well as the number of new fans you get from the ad (called “Actions”).

In the stats above you can see that we’ve had 8 new fans joined as a result of the ad at a cost of almost $5. The Click through Rate is 0.11% which is low but from my experience quite reasonable for Facebook ads. Overall, an interesting and useful addition to the functionality and performance of Facebook ads.

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Using Facebook Ads to Get More Fans

August 27, 2009 at 11:43 pm · Filed under Blogging, Customer Engagement, facebook ·Tagged , , ,

We’ve been running Facebook Ads on and off for over six months now – with varying degrees of success. Overall they can be divided into two types of advertisement:

1) Ads that take people your website 2) Ads to get more fans on your Facebook fan page.

For us the latter has been the most successful. I currently running some Facebook ads to get more fans and am satisfied with the value and results we are getting.

Here’s a few tips and information if you have a Facebook Fan Page and you are thinking of advertising for more fans.

  • Make the ads compeling and give it an incentive for people to click. From trial and error I have found that mentioning your special offers and giveaways work wonders. Here’s our latest ad:

Fb as fan

  •  Select the correct demographic for the ad – this should reflect the breakdown of your customer base.
  • If you mention in the ad that you have offers and giveaways then make sure you have them viewable on the fan page at the time you are running the ad.
  • Decide how much you are prepared to pay for a new fan and see if you are hitting this over time. For example I decided that I can pay 50 US cent for a new fan. You can easily see if you are getting this by looking at the stats. When you are running  an ad to get more fans you will see Cost per Action well as Cost per Click. (when a person clicks on the ad and go to your page, they don’t all click again on the “Become a Fan” button). Cost per Action is the metric you need to keep an eye on. In the following table our Cost per Action for the lifetime of the ad works out at around 45 US cents. That’s 45 cents we are paying for each new fan – good value I think.

FB stats

In case your wondering why I belive that getting more fans on your Facebook page is a good thing for your business. It’s not just a numbers game, collecting fans for the sake of it. Your Facebook fans fall into 2 possible camps. They could be existing customers who are happy to engage with your brand and share this engagement with their Facebook friends. Or they could be Facebook users who have not yet purchased from you. In this case, I believe that there is a much higher chance of them turning into customers if they are fans on your Facebook page.

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Online Shopping within Facebook

August 11, 2009 at 12:22 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged ,

Here’s an interesting new development in the world of Facebook and Online Shopping: 

It’s now possible to shop and checkout completely within a Facebook page. US online flower seller 1-800-flowers.com recently launched an application which enables customers to buy items directly from within their Facebook fan page. This is what it looks like:

flowers 

 It will be interesting to see if this is the first of many such e-commerce sites that will have fully functional stores within Facebook. Watch this, or rather that space.

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Keeping an eye on the weather

July 9, 2009 at 1:17 am · Filed under business decisions, facebook, online advertising ·Tagged , , ,

As retailers of waterproofs, our sales are definitely affected by the weather. This is especially true during the Irish summer months. If we have a prolonged spell of wet weather our sales will generally increase. If the sun shines for a few days our sales will more than likely drop.

Managing our online advertising spend during the summer months can be an interesting task. If the weather is really nice for a few days I normally decrease the daily spend on Google Adwords – sometimes turning it off altogether for a few days of really sunny weather.

I have also been experimenting again with Facebook ads recently. I have set up a few different ads and have been turning them on and off for periods over the last few weeks depending on the day’s weather. Here’s one of them:

FBad

The tool that I find really useful in managing these ads is the Met Eireann Rainfall Radar.

The Rainfall Radar is updated every 15 minutes and shows an accurate picture of the rainfall pattern over Ireland. The colour codes show the intensity of the rainfall and it can be animated on the Met Eireann site to show the progression of the rain in the last few hours. Here are a few examples:

radar 4

It’s raining over most of the country. Decision: Turn the Facebook Ad on for the day.

radar5

It’s mostly fine throughout the country. Decision: No Facebook ads running and reduce the spend on Adwords.

The overall Met Eireann site is very easy to use and provides accurate weather information, forecasts and statistics. I am sure that they expect farmers and fishermen to use their information to decide on their course of action but they might be surprised to learn that an online retailer also makes use of their information to make important business decisions.

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Changing your Facebook Fan Page Username

June 29, 2009 at 8:01 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , ,

Facebook announced a while back that personal Facebook users could change their Facebook url from a randomly selected id to a meaningful url. This was possible for personal facebook pages from last week. So my own facebook profile is now at www.facebook.com/aedanryan.

However, there was a limitation for businesses with Facebook Fan pages. Initially, You needed to have 1000 fans on your page in order to change the url. We didn’t qualify for this as we have around 130 fans signed up on the PuddleDucks fan page.

From today (June 29th), Facebook fan pages with over 100 fans can now get their customised url. To do this go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and select the username for any fan pages that you administer.

Later Update: It is now 25 fans to qualify for a customised username.

Therefore our page which in the past could be found at: www.new.facebook.com/pages/PuddleDucks/22282839694

can now be found at www.facebook.com/puddleducks

facebook fan page

This will make it easier to let people know about our page and to include on marketing material, press releases, email signatures, etc.

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Facebook Page Insights – Two of our Fans are Pirates and other Interesting Facts.

June 5, 2009 at 12:39 am · Filed under facebook ·Tagged , ,

If you have a Facebook fan page you can learn lots of interesting statistics by looking at your Page Insights. This shows analytical information about your page, your fans and their interaction with your fan page.

We have the PuddleDucks fan page up and running for over six months now and we have recently passed the milestone of 100 fans. So I think it’s a good time to look at our Page Insights and here are some of the highlights.

All Fans over Time:

This shows that there is a fairly steady organic growth in new fans at about 10 new fans a month. The big jump at the end of March was due to a campaign to get more new fans by using Facebook Ads and holding a prize draw among fans. Note to self – Must do that again soon.

FB Insights 1

Gender Breakdown:

This is an interesting breakdown which I think closely reflects the normal gender breakdown of our customers.

Looking at the breakdown, I see we have 22% Male and 77% Female fans. Wonder what gender the remaining 1% is?!

 FB Insights 2

Location Breakdown:

No surprises here – our business is mostly targeted at the Irish market so this is the expected breakdown. But it’s nice to see we have one fan out there in the UAE – not a market I had considered as a big one for waterproof clothes. Maybe I’ll look into that now (joke!).

FB Insights 3

Language Breakdown:

Now this was a surprise. Two of our fans are Pirates! Well, two of our fans have switched their language in Facebook to English (Pirate) which changes the normal Facebook terms to “Pirate Language” terms. Here’s a few examples:

  • Fans = Crewmembers
  • Friends = Me Hearties
  • Log Out = Abandon Ship
  • Info = Cap’n’s Log
  • What’s on your mind? = What be troublin’ ye

Try it out – it’s good fun to set your language to English (Pirate) for a while. Just go to Settings, Language to do it. But I’m not sure that I’d like to keep it as a permanent setting though.

So to finish, I’d just like to say “Aaar, mateys. It be pleasin’ to have you on board” to our two Pirate crewmembers.

FB insights 4

PS: If you’d like to join as a fan on our page – if you’re a Pirate or not – you can do it here.

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