It is no surprise that Facebook is the number one social media site available, boasting 2 billion active monthly users and over a billion who access the site daily from their phones and/or computers. This site creates the perfect opportunity for you to reach a great number of people from different lifestyles and backgrounds who can interact with your business and your products online.
Let’s Consider the Demographics
It is estimated that 75% of men and 83% of women use Facebook every day. And while 88% of people ages 18-29 use Facebook, 62% of adults over the age of 65 are active on the site. For such a large age gap, there isn’t really much of a missing demographic of people. However, 62% is an even larger number when compared with the 8-10% of people 65+ who use platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and only 16% who use sites like Pinterest. It is also worth a mention that 82% of users have attended some college, while 79% have graduated, and the incomes of users range all across the board from >$30,000 a year to well over $80,0000. Given these statistics, it is clear that all walks of life use this resource daily, and it is the prime opportunity to connect with your customer database. But how?
Create Events
Facebook events are a great way to reach out into your community and encourage foot traffic in your business. Each year 40% more people engage with public events created by pages on Facebook. And a great deal of those public events are shared among parents and parenting groups in your community. Increasingly, a majority of conversation among parents and educators is done online and a majority of events are planned and posted to Facebook. Planning events and inviting your followers, along with promoting it through the Facebook marketplace, allows you to reach a wide customer base and invite more people to your store.
Try to do a featured item for the month and plan an event around it, like a demonstration, a special guest, or a sales event. Community events like story times for children or workshops are a great way to reach out and show your appreciation for your community while also spotlighting some of the products you sell. See what other stores around you have done and what you can do for your own business and the products you sell.
Facebook Live
A great way to showcase your inventory and demonstrate toys without risking broken toys or worrying about the turnout, is to demonstrate it using a Facebook Live event. Live events are incredibly useful because they make your followers feel more connected to you and statistically, live videos are watched 3 times longer during the stream than on the replay. Plus, your videos are available for people to watch later, no matter what, so you get the added bonus of the video posting in addition to the views during the live stream.
There are tons of options on what you can do for a live stream. You can offer a detailed step by step video on how to build something using a block system like Flexo, and invite your viewers ahead of time to build it at home and ask questions as they go. Or you can do a craft like So Glow once a week or month where your viewers can follow along and do the same craft at home, preferably with products from your store. Promote your live events and plan them ahead of time so that people will be prepared for them and they can follow along. It’s a great way to invite people into your store and show them what products you have to offer without having to leave your store.
Encourage Sharing, Likes, and Follows
It also important to know that studies have shown that everyone on Facebook is no more than 3.5 degrees separated, as opposed to the 6 degrees of separation proposed in daily life. That means that for every post or event that your followers share, you have a higher chance of it spreading to a wider audience than simply by word of mouth. So create posts that are interesting or eye catching, and incorporate promotions with giveaways for tagging a friend or specials for people who share the post. The more people your posts reach, the more chance you have saturating the marketplace with your product.
A great option is to have a toy giveaway for the person who invites the most people to an event, or a specialty or novelty item for a random person who is tagged in the comments. Promotions like that often generate all kinds of responses and followers.
Be Purposeful
People spend an average of 35 minutes on Facebook every day, and access the site an average of 8 times a day. It may seem like a lot but that is less than 6 minutes each time someone logs in to browse their feed, which gives you only a fraction of a second to catch someone’s attention as they scroll by. So it is important that your posts be purposeful and not to over post. Users have reported that pages that post too much are far more likely to be unfollowed than those that only post sparingly. So when you do make a post, you want to make sure it says exactly what you want to say and catches the eyes and ears of the people scrolling.
Also, 19% of people’s time on their phones is spent on Facebook so make sure that all of your media and videos are mobile friendly. Videos that don’t have captions, or that require sound are often less likely to be watched and responded to because they are being watched on a phone and most likely in a public setting. Keep in mind the attention span of your audience and make sure that what you are posting shouldn’t always take up too much time or users will ignore it.