A lot of small-scale businesses and sole entrepreneurs start their businesses online via Facebook or Instagram. Starting by selling items on Facebook for example is a sensible option because it is cheap and has a wider reach.
Key Takeaways
- Specialize on one product first.
- Set up a Facebook shop. Don’t sell things on your personal timeline.
- Learn to do Facebook Ads by yourself.
- Integrate Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and your website.
- Do not spam people with your products.
However, there are some common mistakes that if you avoid, your business will pick up much faster.
Do not be a generalist
A generalist is a person who is selling anything and everything. It is harder for online customers to trust you if you seem to deal with all things because the first thing that occurs to them is that you are a broker. And Kenyans avoid brokers.
Instead, pick a niche and focus on it. Your page should be dedicated to a specific line of items like baby clothes, ladies’ shoes, men’s clothing, electronics, etc. Do not start off with all of these things at once.
The narrower the niche you pick the less competition you also get from other individuals. For instance, there could be a thousand pages selling men’s clothing but only one or two are dedicated to specific items like bowties or boxers.
Overall, do not be a generalist – especially when starting out.
Separate your personal account from your business page
Selling items from your personal page is not scalable at all. This does not mean that you cannot advertise things on your personal page but more often than not it is in bad taste to your friends.
Imagine a scenario where one of your Facebook friends suddenly starts selling Sufurias and then all they post about are Sufurias. It becomes a thin line differentiating if their account is for running a business or for personal interactions.
A better way is to start a page for your business (even in your name – like Jane Wa Sufuria) and then post products there even as you ask your friends on Facebook to support and like the page.
Such a page becomes easy to grow because, from a business perspective, customers will form a relationship with the page rather than the owner of the business. This is good because as you grow the business, you can delegate social media management to someone else other than you.
Learn how Facebook advertising works
Facebook advertising will teach you how to unlock the full potential of selling things via Facebook. The best part is that learning how the ads work will take just a day of watching YouTube videos and reading blogs. Take a pen and paper and write down how to do it.
The result is that you will organize your ads better, learn to stop doing random sponsored posts, invest your money well in the ads and grow faster in the process. There is a lot that goes into Facebook ads that people assume they know but a quick lesson online will show you how much there is to learn.
Facebook ads can help you target very specific people that can easily become customers of your business. For example, you can focus only on iPhone users that travel outside the country frequently or people in Kilimani that are between 18 years and 25 years that are interested in sneakers. The options are unlimited as long as you know your way around the ad creation features.
In some cases, a little knowledge of doing ads is what will make your page grow faster than your competitors.
Use simple integration
When you are just starting out on Facebook as a one-person team, use simple interactions between social media accounts (or with a very simple website) to manage orders.
Do not be tempted, for example, to set up and use a Shopify e-commerce store at first unless you have the time, money, and a ready customer base.
Facebook gives you options to link with Instagram which can consolidate messages – orders – between these two platforms.
Secondly, a phone number that leads to a WhatsApp group (or a WhatsApp message button) will do wonders in simplifying the amount of work needed to monitor every order placed. WhatsApp itself has a powerful business tool that can manage orders and arrange clients by urgency or other features.
Make use of these first before trying more complicated integrations.
Admittedly, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are perhaps all you need at the start. Eventually, once you have a large following and a steady flow of customers, you can build an e-commerce site and add the more complex integrations used by larger companies.
Do not spam people
Think of your favorite seller on Facebook with thousands of likes and how they make posts, advertise and give offers. Are they annoying? Do they post their items in every Facebook group? Do they post under random people’s comments about their products?
The answer is likely No.
A good trick to avoid being seen as spamming people is to plan your posts.
Write down how many posts you will make in a day, what the posts will say, when you will post them and where you will post them. The first three are easy to do but the fourth one needs you to find Facebook groups that are aligned with your products and find out which ones can allow you to make posts. Once in the group, a single post or two in a day works well.
In general, think of your posts from the customer’s side. Will they be annoyed at how many posts you are sharing with them?
In conclusion
These tips may look counterintuitive to how most people approach Facebook but they are definitely the reason some businesses grow faster on Facebook than others.
