Everything you need to know about Facebook & Instagram Shops

As a business owner, one of the most powerful and effective ways to market your products without the costs of advertising online is via your social media. With over 500 million daily active users and over 1.7 billion daily active users respectively, Instagram and Facebook are two of the most popular social media platforms today.

Facebook and Instagram provide a great way to help increase brand awareness and reach new customers, while also helping you to connect and engage with potential buyers.

Facebook and Instagram Shops—Your online storefront

On May 19, 2020, Facebook announced a brand new way to showcase your products to your social media visitors on Facebook and Instagram with Facebook and Instagram shops.

You heard it right! Your social media visitors can browse your entire store, save the products they’re interested in, and make purchases without ever having to leave your Facebook or Instagram page.*

This is a fantastic new opportunity for you to promote your products on your Facebook and Instagram pages, and to create meaningful experiences for your customers.

*For direct purchases on the Facebook app, you need to have checkouts enabled. This service is currently available only in the US. If you are based outside the US, don’t worry. Your customers can still follow the product link and complete their purchase on your store.

How can you use Facebook and Instagram Shops to sell more?

Facebook Advertising isn’t always the right option, especially if you have a smaller business with limited time and budget to put into your marketing effort.

Facebook and Instagram Shops make it super easy to get started with social media marketing.

Your Storefront Made Accessible:

Showcase your products and collections on your Facebook and Instagram pages—it’s like a storefront, but online.

Enhanced Product Discovery on Instagram:

Instagram shops are a new way for Instagram users to find your products through Instagram Explore. Your products, collections, and your shop will be shown to users who are more likely to interact with it. Think of it as an organic promotion of your products to the right audience.

Leverage Instagram Shopping:

Tag your lifestyle shots with the products featured on the image and leverage the tagged products with your Instagram shop, creating a complete shopping experience for your customers.

How are Facebook and Instagram Shops different from Facebook and Instagram Ads?

Facebook and Instagram ads are a form of paid online advertising with ad placements on Facebook and Instagram. They can be in your Facebook news feed, Instagram feed, Instagram stories, etc.

Facebook and Instagram Shops are completely free and you can get started with them very easily.
At Socioh, we have created the perfect set of tools so you spend less time on tedious tasks like importing each product manually to your Facebook shop and focus more on driving your business forward.

Socioh and Facebook & Instagram Shops: Everything just became a whole lot easier
(and faster)

When handling your product feed for Facebook and Instagram Shops directly, Facebook expects you to manually upload your listings.

Okay, sure, you just spent hours putting up the listings manually, phew, that must be it, right?
Nope!
Updated inventory? Upload again.
Prices changed? Upload again.
New products? That’s right, upload again!

It can easily take hours out of your day if you want to keep your catalog fresh and up-to-date. This is where Socioh steps in—we just took your lemons and turned em’ into lemonade! Here’s how:

24-Hour Automatic Feed Update:

Feel free to add new products, change prices or inventory, or both—we’ll automatically update your product feed for Facebook and Instagram every 24 hours.

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Priority In-app Support:

Stuck somewhere and need some help? Drop us a message through our help bubble on our dashboard and we’ll keep you moving.

You MUST be itching to get started? Let’s do it!

Quick Guide to Set up your Facebook Shop

Set up your Facebook Business Manager:

Facebook Business Manager is necessary to get started with any Facebook business tool like ads, pages, shops, etc.
Have you set up a Facebook Business Manager account yet? If not, click here to set one up!

Connect your Instagram Page to your Facebook Business Manager:

To use your product catalogs on your Instagram page for tagging or as your storefront, you will need to connect your Instagram page to your Facebook Business Manager. If you run Facebook ads for your store, connecting your Instagram account also allows you to advertise on Instagram.

‍Follow this link to connect your Instagram page to your Facebook Business Manager.

New to Instagram? Set up your Instagram account using the Instagram app available on the Play Store for Android or the App Store for iOS.

Store Domain Verification with Facebook:

Once you've completed the step above. setting up a Shop is pretty simple.

You'll need to verify your website domain with Facebook.
Simply follow this Facebook guide to the tee!

Create a Catalog and Setting up a Shop

All that's left to do is to create a standard catalog through Socioh and set up a new Shop on Facebook.

You’re done!

‍Note: If you are on Socioh's Buddy plan (the free plan), your standard catalog will be limited to 500 products.

If you’ve got any questions at all, we’re here to help. Reach out to us at hi@socioh.com or drop us a message on the help bubble on our dashboard.

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Stay home, stay safe! :)

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