How to go about promoting on facebook and other social media....

[Former_Member]

I looked on facebook and looked up advertising and they have two types of accounts for businesses: daily, and lifetime. But people from here post about their items/shops all the time and I wonder if I'm looking in the right place. I think about the $1.00/day deal. That seems high to me. i was under the impression that people posted on facebook all the time....for free! I know twitter and pinterest are free. But more people go to facebook, I think.

Oh! how do you go about this on facebook and how much does it cost? What about Twitter?

[KittyStoykovich]

HI Rhonda,
I've paid for advertising with Facebook in the past year. What I chose was the daily, but only for a couple days at a time. It did result in a lot of LIKES for my FB page and a couple orders. I went the safe route because of the cost investment for long term advertising...but if you have the cash resources to do it, Facebook does a good job of getting you out there and getting you business. I have not had as much luck with sales through twitter....pinterest I have. I say try a few short runs of ads through FB and see what you get :) good luck
Kitty

[Former_Member]

I'm not really that fond of Twitter. I find I can post/share a lot more on Facebook. Interest has been pretty good so far.

I'm definitely going to try the ads through Facebook now. I've heard a few people had good things happen from that.

[TinyTiptoesBoutique]

Thanks for sharing! I've been looking at the FB ads for a little while and wondering how effective they really are.

[PiecesOfMePaperCraft]

Do you have a FB page for your shop? If not, I'd work on setting one up and getting real followers - meaning followers that are truly interested in your content. Once you reach 30 followers you can follow your page insights which will help you gauge what types of status updates bring the most views to your page. I have a FB page but no budget to pay for promoting it. I also look at it from a FB user point of view. I hate seeing sponsored posts in my personal page feed. 99% of the time I hide them and tell FB not to show me posts from that page again. I don't want someone doing that with posts from my page. So far my page insights don't show that anyone has hidden my page, which is a good thing!

[Former_Member]

I agree, you should start by creating a facebook page for your business and go from there.

Just curious, if you're on vacation, why do you need advertising?

[TheOrangeApp]

Hi Rhonda,

Are you talking about advertising on FB or just posting on your business page on FB?

"i was under the impression that people posted on facebook all the time....for free!" - yes, they do. The pricing you are talking about is only for advertising.

When you set up your FB page, you do get asked for an ad budget, but this is optional. You can click the 'skip' button on the bottom right corner of that screen and continue with your free business page.

Let me know if I've misunderstood or you need any help setting up your page.

Sahiba

[MomDaughterCraft]

I have a Fb page for my shop. I tried ads for few weeks, it doubled the number of people who liked my page, had a lot of impressions (number of people who looked and visited my Fb page). But I cannot say that it changed the number of views and sales on my Etsy shop page.

[Former_Member]

Hi Mel,

Well, I don't think I'll be on vacation forever-just giving it a break for a while and doing some checking around and seeing what I need to do to improve sales.

Hi Sahiba, thanks, that's the way I thought it should be. We can have a facebook page-but it doesn't mean we have to pay for advertising. And you can make posts to all your friends using your business page?

[PiecesOfMePaperCraft]

Your friends will have to "like" your business page to see the posts in their feed.

[Former_Member]

Well, I think I will advertise occationaly on facebook as well as just having a page. I figure $1.00 every month or so would not be that bad.

R.

[TheOrangeApp]

Hi Rhonda,

Here are a couple of articles you may find useful:

How FB shows your (non-advertised) posts to your fans: http://orangetwig.com/blog/why-my-facebook-fans-dont-see-my-posts?ref=es

Types of advertising on FB: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2013/01/11/understanding-the-difference-between-facebook-sponsored-sto...

Sahiba

[GrannyKnowsBest]

I've found an article for Facebook - some advices on how to atract followers. It helped me a lot, most of the things I knew, but there was some very small details that matter...

http://kimgarst.com/fun-creative-ways-increase-likes

Nevyana

[DIYmk]

I personally like to use the EtsyTeamShop app, since they promote your shop every week with $25 gift card giveaways and it is free.
All it does is just connects your FB site with your Etsy shop. You can try for your self http://tinyurl.com/FB-bus-shop

[Former_Member]

There is a difference between advertising with FB and posting to promote your shop on FB.

Advertising with FB does have a cost. Those are the ads that are displayed to the right of the screen. I tried it. But it got me likes to pages that seemed to be fake (just started within a couple of months with very little to no posts, no friends, and one or two pictures). I stopped. Since then I have noticed that ads that show pictures of my items as an Etsy promotion will display on the side bar for people that have either shopped or searched on Etsy before, and people that post about items similar to mine (this is where having decent SEO comes in handy).

If you have a business page for your shop, you can post all you want for free to promote your shop. Those posts are only seen by people that "like" your business page. It can be seen by more if you post on promotional pages and if you share the posts on your personal FB page.