In this post we provide an overview of 4 of the most popular e-commerce apps for Facebook. These apps represent four different approaches to trading on Facebook, namely:

1. A downloadable app that allows you to transact within your existing Facebook presence (see Pavyment)
2. A catalog application that organizes your products, but links back to your existing online store (see Storefront Social)
3. An integrated e-commerce platform that includes extensions to include Facebook commerce (see BigCommerce)
4. A bespoke development environment for Facebook commerce (see 8th Bridge)

1. Pavyment

Payvment seems to be the clear leader with over 60,000 stores already active on the platform. It is free, easy to install and just requires some basic information, shipping, tax, products etc and you are on our way. HTML customisation is limited to the product pages, but the app is easy to install and add your products. Payments are via Paypal, as well as Visa, Mastercard and Amex, and allows your fans to checkout and pay from within Facebook.

Products are loaded by CSV  and you can have a Featured Product (either automatic or manual selection) on the home page. This free beta appears to be a robust, trusted and reliable solution and with a comprehensive features list.

Example: store:  Orglamix Cosmetics

2. Storefront Social

Storefront Social looks to be a promising system, its most appealing feature is that it can take products from an RSS feed, which should make it easy to setup with any decent e-commerce system. It’s available for a monthly fee, starting from $9.95 a month.

Clicking on a product within the Facebook store then takes you to your online store. This is not true Facebook commerce, but may be suitable for those who want to promote their products on Facebook (users can share/tweet the products direct from the app) whilst still using their online store to handle orders and payments.

Again, customisation seems to be limited, with only a choice of templates to alter the layout of the products and a banner image of your choice. For more details on the features click here

Example store: Livescribe

3.            Bigcommerce

BigCommerce is a online platform with an option to sell via your Facebook page. Like Social Front, clicks on the product page on your Facebook store take you back to the main e-commerce site – running on the BigCommerce platform. This will suit some retailers who want one e-commerce enviroment to use to trade on Ebay, Facebook as well as act as standalone e-commerce operation.

Example store: BabyandMeGifts

4.               8th Bridge

8^th Bridge is another company offering what appears to be a good rival but has no real details of its service offering. They ask that merchants to contact them to discuss requirements. This system also allows checking out and paying from within Facebook. From what we’ve seen the platform appears to be Flash-based which could be off-putting for some. It’s a shame there’s not more information to make a better comparison with the other apps.

Example store: 1-800 Flowers

Summary

These apps represent the four approaches that could be taken to developing a Facebook store. In our opinion, many retailers should be testing the appeal of Facebook commerce to their fans and customers. For this reason, we believe a full test of Facebook commerce, with integration into a payment gateway, beats simply mounting a catalogue of your products with a link back to your existing online store. That’s why we favour using apps like Pavyment to get the full experience of Facebook commerce.

If you would like to discuss how to take the first steps in Facebook commerce, then give us a call on +44 1904 653740 or email dan@appliedwebanalytics dot com.

Gus: OK Vlad, just imagine a sales funnel. People don’t just come to your website and within 30 seconds they have placed an order. There is a process of the visitor becoming engaged with the brand.

Vlad: I still don’t understand what ‘engaged’ means.

Gus: See it as a necessary step before an order is placed; that the visitor is interested in your brand, your products or service, and is ready to place an order. That could happen on their first visit but it might be their fifth visit.

Vlad: I have read Eric T Petersen’s writings about ‘scoring’ visitors on the basis of what content they viewed, whether they were returning, if it was a direct visit, length of session and whether they completed other non-transactional goals. But it’s not easy to get your head around.

Gus: I agree, it’s not straightforward. Plus, each business will weight these factors differently and therefore come up with a different ‘engagement score’. My issue is that there are ways of engaging a visitor with your brand off-site.

Vlad: What do you mean ‘off-site’?

Gus: I think social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are playing increasingly important roles in delivering an ‘engaged’ visitor to your website.

Vlad: You mean, Facebook or Twitter as a referring site?

Gus: Yes, but more than that. I mean that a website visitor has spent time interacting with your brand on your Facebook page, and becoming comfortable with what you offer, learnt more about the business and the people – and then they come to website far readier and more prepared to transact. Ultimately, back to sales funnel approach, if you have more ‘engaged’ visitors coming onto your site you’ll have higher conversion rates.

Vlad: Are you suggesting that our clients should be investing in Facebook; building and maintaining pages and content?

Gus: I am, yes. There are other reasons why businesses should be seriously looking at Facebook as an opportunity

Firstly, the number of visits that Facebook receives is now higher than Google. You see the how Google’s traffic in blue was surpassed by Facebook’s in 2008.

With over 400m Facebook accounts, every demographic is on there. Even you have got a Facebook account, Vlad. This means that our client’s target audience is there already.

Vlad: Are you saying that as well as maintaining an e-commerce website, our clients have got to be building other sites as well?

Gus: If that’s where there audience is, then yes, of course.

Vlad: OK, but how do you think most businesses are currently thinking about Facebook?

Gus: I suppose it divides into three groups. Those who haven’t realised the importance of Facebook and so have done nothing. Those that have got a presence, but not really understood how to use it to create engaged visitors, and I think a small group currently of companies who are making a good fist of their Facebook presence.

Dave Chaffey lists some examples of business who have built engaging Facebook pages including STA Travel, Dell’s Social Media for Small Businesses, Howies, Marmite, The National Trust and Wiggly Wigglers.

Vlad: I have heard of Wiggly Wigglers, they do these fantastic off-the-wall podcasts about wormeries and composting.

Gus: It’s also interesting to hear from Justin Kistner that big brands like Unilever and Coca Cola are reallocating all the budget for developing microsites, and instead investing these funds in developing their Facebook presence, including Facebook apps.

Vlad: Presumably, because they already have a lot of traffic going to their current Facebook pages, whereas they will need to build the traffic to these microsites from scratch?

Gus: Exactly.

The most commonly cited reasons for businesses to invest in Facebook are firstly, to get found by people looking for your product and service ..

Vlad: But that’s what Google does?

Gus: I know, but since there’s now more traffic going to Facebook than Google, you also need to have a presence on Facebook.

Secondly, Facebook is good way of connecting, and back to our theme, of ‘engaging’ your customers and prospects. Three, it’s a good environment in which you build a sense of community around your business and merchandise, and also it’s a great way to promote the content you’ve got.

Vlad: Plus, there will also be some SEO benefits as well.

Gus: Right, you have a lot of control over both the content and Facebook that can help with your SEO ranking. Creating links to and from your website will help, having specific landing pages or tabs” will help direct traffic to the right place as well as posting keyword rich content into particular parts of your Facebook profile. There’s a lot of help out there to improve your SEO from Facebook.

Vlad: All of that’s good, but whenever Facebook is mentioned on the news it seems to be always some issue with privacy.

Gus: Yeah, I know. I think as a business they are walking a fine line between ‘helping people to share their content’ and giving control to users over their visibility on Facebook. But I am sure that they aware that if they screw up on privacy, the consequences would be monumental.

Vlad: Isn’t that an argument to sit it out and see what happens?

Gus: It could be. It depends on how one’s competitors might react to the Facebook opportunity.

Given the momentum behind social media, I think the ‘do nothing’ approach is the riskiest one.

Vlad: OK, but before we dive into Facebook with our clients, I need to understand what makes an engaging Facebook presence, what type of page they should have, etc. etc.

Gus: Agreed. The first thing to realise is that as a business you can opt to set up a Group or a Page on Facebook.

Vlad: What’s the difference?

Gus: In a nutshell, brands should build a Page rather than a Group. Pages are indexed by search engines and you can add apps from the list of 55,000 available Facebook applications. With groups you don’t get these benefits, and that’s why Pages work better. Here’s a good link to explain the difference between Pages and Groups in more detail.

Vlad: But, presumably you can’t just stick up a Facebook and not maintain it?

Gus: Right, not maintaining it and keeping it up-to-date could look worse than not having a Facebook presence at all.

Vlad: So our clients are going to have commit resources to maintaining their pages. And if they are spending time on this then the client will want to measure their impact of their efforts.

Gus: Exactly, and you know a few things about measuring social media, but first of all I want to look at what makes a great Facebook page.

Vlad: OK, let’s talk about measurement later.

Gus: Here’s a list of things to get right when setting up your Facebook page

1. Get a vanity URL that is easy to remember and includes your brand name, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/Marmite.
2. Spend time on making sure you have a compelling landing page – see Oxfam’s
3. Just like you would with a website home page, make it obvious what you offer and a what visitor can do on your Facebook page
4. Don’t let visitors arrive on your Wall – you have less control of what your fans are saying, so the first time that a visitor arrives you want to ensure that they understand the benefit your business offers
5. Use the Custom Tabs, as Oxfam have done, to segment your visitors into those with particular interests
6. Make sure there is up-to-date, relevant content on your Pages
7. Cross-promote your other channels – retail outlets, catalogue , online shop, Twitter feed, etc
8. Investigate what Facebook apps are likely to be appealing to your target audience
9. Finally, remember to comments on your fans’ comments and participate in the discussion

Vlad: You mentioned that there are lots of apps that you can add to your Page. What types of apps are popular.

Gus: There are over 50,000 apps so there is going to be something for everyone. The obvious ones to include are slideshows of your pics, product feeds, surveys and polls, discount coupons, the Facebook online shop, events as well as wishlists and games. A good place to start is Involver who develop both free and paid-for apps.

Added to this you have got FMBL, which is an evolved subset of HTML. This gives you even more control over your environment.

Vlad: And what about the wisdom of advertising on Facebook.

Gus: I agree with Justin Kistner of Webtrends, although the Facebook’s advertising platform is nowhere near as mature as Google Adwords, it is worth building up expertise in using Facebook’s platform.

If the Facebook’s traffic continues to build then more and more businesses will start to consider migrating some of the paid search budget to Facebook. Ideally, you want to be ahead of that curve, so you are not coming to it totally green.

Vlad: From my reading, it seems Facebook is investing in giving its Page owners more usable data.

Have you seen the analytics interface ?

You get to see demographic data of your fans, as well as the interactions taking place on your page.

Interestingly, Facebook are offering an API where you can get more data from this source than you can from these report.

Gus: I thought you had some reservations about the tagging up your Facebook page with your tags from your analytics provider?

Vlad: I do. Based on reports, I understand that Facebook are prone to change some technical architecture, often with warning. This means that your tags may not collect the data in the way you first envisaged.

If you are using your tags inside your Facebook Pages then you need to monitor their accuracy far more regularly than you would on your website. It’s down to the fact that you’re not in control of the platform.

Gus: What other options do you have to measure your efforts on Facebook.

Vlad: Apart from exploring what data you can get out of the Facebook API, you should set up a filter to isolate your Facebook traffic in your analytics tool. By default, we set up a social media filter for our clients on the Google Analytics account, and then reassign the medium of traffic as ‘social ’ rather than ‘referral’.

Here’s the list of referrers we capture and reassign as medium = ‘social’

blog|forum|board|community|group|answers\.yahoo\.|twitter|facebook|linkedin|flickr|digg|livejournal|myspace|tumblr|del\.?icio.?us|faves|reddit|squidoo|stumbleupon|technorati|netvibes|newsgator|wikipedia|wordpress|typepad|PRweb|ow\.ly|gumtree|feedburner

This means you can look at how social media traffic behaves differently to other sources of traffic. But unless you have tagged up your Facebook pages with your own tags, and accepted the extra monitoring you will need to do, you should be focussed on analysing the results from two reporting systems – Facebook and Google Analytics.

Another thing you can do is to use Hubspot’s Facebook Grader. The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are, the completeness of your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to.

But measuring Facebook activity is, in principle, no different from measuring website activity. It requires our clients to focus on what business outcomes they want to achieve and always be tying the data back to these objectives. We recently produced a book review on Social Media Metrics and Jim Sterne is adamant that just because it’s ‘social media’ doesn’t mean the measures we use shouldn’t be ‘hard’.

Gus: I think for me, the interesting thing about developing a Facebook presence is what this might mean for the future. If the momentum of the ‘social graph’ continues, then the idea that we should be trying to drive visitors to our little ol’ standalone e-commerce website may seem very old-fashioned. If people are living their lives on social media platforms, then that is where businesses should be.

We’ve already heard reports that conversion rates are higher on Facebook where the conversion occurs on Facebook. With the growth of apps, it’s hard to conceive a scenario where a Facebook visitors would need to leave that environment to complete a process or transaction.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the impact of mobile devices..

Vlad: That’s for another day.

Introduction

The importance of having Jim turn his attention to how to measure and optimize social media should not be overlooked. Here’s someone who has charted, chronicled and challenged many of the online developments we now take for granted. Whilst social media has been around a lot longer than we think, the “Social Media” that has got both marketers and CEOs both excited and anxious is still in its infancy. It’s the same social media that has now become headline-making and time-consuming, so that we are forced to say ‘hold on, are we getting anything out of all of this?’. This is where Jim steps in.

What I like immediately about this book (and I like books as my way of digesting information) is that Jim is very clear about what this book is and is not about. Thankfully, it’s not another diatribe about how game-changing social media is and you need to get your hands dirty with this range of tools. This book is about how to measure your investment – and although social media may be free, your time is not – in social media.

Who’s this book for?

In my view, these groups of people will find this book especially useful:

• Organisations and individuals who have made some investments in social media and want to quantify the results they are getting
• Those who remain sceptical about the chaotic nature of social media, but are afraid that they are about to get left behind – and therefore want to bring some structure to their future endeavours.
• Practitioners and consultants who want to help their clients develop a system of measurement that will stand up to scrutiny, and can be discussed sensibly at board level, without hysteria or hyperbole

Sructure

I get a great deal of comfort from a book of this type that starts off each chapter with a verb. The author has understood that the reader wants to do something, learn a few things, take away a bit more and ultimately take some action. Jim’s favourite verb is “getting” – getting focused, getting attention, getting respect, getting emotional – see what I mean.

Chapter 1 starts as the book goes on – setting your objectives. No investment, social media or otherwise, can be justified unless it meets one of the three big goals, namely:-

• Increase revenue
• Lower costs
• Improve customer satisfaction

The rest of the chapters, read chronologically, form a pattern of a traditional sales funnel. Chapter 2 is concerned with Getting Attention and reaching your audience, most importantly, not just any audience – but your audience. Chapter 3 – looks at how to spread your message through your networks in Getting Respect. Getting Emotional, the next chapter, recognizes that your message is an empty vessel unless we ascribe a sentiment to it. Understanding and classifying sentiment – positive, negative, neutral, sarcastic, humourous, etc. whilst not straightforward is vital in measuring the impact your social media activities are having.

Chapter 5 and Getting Response looks at the question of how you can track back the interactions you having the social media space to some desired outcomes. Getting the Message, in the next chapter, takes a small diversion from the ‘sale funnel’ approach and concentrates on the skills and techniques social media practitioners require for being both a good communicator, and most importantly, a good listener. Chapter 7, Getting Results, ties back your efforts to the overall objectives you set in Chapter 1. Chapter 8 outlines the way in different ways to ‘sell’ social media to the various tribes of doubters and naysayers.

The final chapter looks to the future and what the metathemes of social media might signify for the relationship between buyers and sellers in a networked world.

It ain’t new

Despite the furore and headlines around Twitter, it’s worth remembering that many forms of social media, in relative forms, have long histories. Message boards, review and opinion sites, blogging, bookmarking sites as well as media sharing platforms are well-known and familiar. The phenomenal growth in Twitter usage and Facebook’s rivalling of Google has naturally brought attention to how these newer community tools can be used. Some of this attention is directly from businesses and marketers working out how this form of ‘free marketing’ can be exploited to their benefit.

But a networked view of markets and buyers is not new either. The Cluetrain Manifesto of 1999, with its 95 theses, already understood that ‘markets are conversations’, and that most companies were failing to be involved in those conversations out of ‘obsolete notions of command and control’. From an offline perspective, David Ford and the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group, 9 years before Cluetrain, wrote persuasively about a chaotic, non-hierarchical view of industrial relationships. The Internet, and its newer forms, has simply given (?) these type of ‘relationship’ tools to the marketers.

Equivalence

One of the interesting themes that Sterne explores, is that of equivalence in the chapter, Getting Respect – Identifying Influence. Whilst the goal of many retention campaigns is to create ‘raving fans’, Sterne looks at one company’s approach to measuring fans. Baekdal of Baekdal.com defined fans as “one who either follows everything you do, or actively points other people to you – or both”.  Based on his web stats, Baekdal was able to calculate that one fan was ‘equivalent’ to 445 regular online visitors. With an average fan having an average of 445 fans themselves, 15 fans commenting on a Facebook page broadcast this message to 6,675 others.

For those who have struggled to monetize ‘engagement’ activity, here was a clear-cut example. If you can put a value on a website visitor, and you can identify the equivalent number of visitors a fan is worth, you can monetize your social media marketing efforts. Added to that, if you can examine the success of fans in recruiting other fans, the ROI of social media just got a whole lot better.

Like every good book on web analytics there is the caveat about data purity, and Sterne makes the necessary right noises about the need for careful expectation setting. Data quality issues in the online space are well-known, and Sterne is right to make the case for correct presentation of the exactitude of the data, rather than sweeping the issue deftly aside.

Visualising and measuring networks

As well as putting a value on a fan, the book talks meaningfully about measuring ‘interconnectedness’ using a variety of tools. Companies like FMS Advanced Systems Group, Axiom, Rapleaf and Unbound Technologies have built tools that allow you to see, in visual form, how the form of these networks change over time and interact with one another.  Whilst some tools focus on following ‘conversations’, others look at the linkages, via blogrolls for example, between actors.  The goal of all this spidery network visualisation is to identify clusters, trending topics and important actors within your network. This could all be useful intelligence in targeting the right message to a significant group within your network.

Based on Pareto’s law, many of those in your network will be connected, but as Sterne asks, are they ‘respected’? Authority and impact are two measures for assessing the value of individual actors, whilst tools like Peterson’s Twitalyzer focus on generosity, signal velocity, clout and influence. However, like many activities in web analytics, you need to rely on more than one tool. Technorati may be great if many of your prospects and customers are blogging away; Twitalyzer is a powerful tool (and let’s not forget free) for those active on Twitter, but the real value, as well as hard work, will come when you come to aggregate these views into a single system. Until the technology catches up, it would appear you still need to do some pulling together of spreadsheets and Powerpoints for the exec team.

Sentiment

One of the reasons automation has struggled with social media metrics is that of recognizing sentiment. Whilst it is straightforward to capture mentions and retweets of items containing your brand name, what exactly were they saying about you? Think about emotions like sarcasm and irony, and see if you can work out ways for this type of emotions to be correctly classified. Not easy.

Although Sterne outlines frameworks for classifying sentiment – polarity and intensity – the text analysis tools necessary to automate and accurately classify millions of posts, tweets and reviews appears wanting, as Sterne opines

“Perhaps machines can eventually be taught. But who will teach them? Machines have a hard time with this because humans do, too”

Whilst we recognize that listening is just as important as participating in these ‘conversations’ their sheer quantity force us to look towards technology for the answer, when the real difficulty lies in codifying our own language. Layering on top of this semantic challenge is listening to those speaking in other languages, from different cultures and orthogonal perspectives.

One answer might be to look at what people do, rather than what they say – isn’t this after all the difference between market research and testing?

Measuring response

There are many ways to record actions of both prospects and customers, and Sterne has arranged this into a pyramidal “Engagement Food Chain”. The chain (why not a pyramid?) starts with Saw, advancing to Saved and Rated, and ends with Purchased and Recommended. Leaving aside some of the data challenges of identifying individuals, this model works well, particularly if you have an entirely online business model. This sales funnel view of the world makes the assumptions that the more people you have say, Commenting, ceteris paribus, the more you will have at the Purchasing stage. It’s classic stuff, and I am inclined to believe the underlying assumption.

Customer service and crowdsourcing

If you are still having difficulty convincing the Exec team after showing them how many visitors each fan is worth and how your volume of recommendations is positively correlated to your recent boost sales, try the Customer Service pitch. Many organisations have seen quick wins from listening to complaints from customers, and going on to help them out. For those, worried about getting involved in the ‘naked conversation’, using social media to resolve customer issues feels manageable, and can bring some personality. Virgin America, for example, has met those tweeting in-flight about poor service at the landing gate with “customer recovery coupons”. My sense is that, over time, customers will come to expect this type of interaction and woe betide the large corporations who have the wherewithal to do this, but sadly don’t.

One of the most interesting developments of social media is that of crowdsourcing – using the power of the many to develop innovative ideas as to how products and services can be improved. Asking your customer what could be done better, is not terribly new, but the volume of responses that can be garnered and the feedback loop as to what changes have been implemented make this a powerful tool.  So when Dell.com gets 2,000 appeals for Linux to be pre-loaded on their laptops and PCs, it can respond, and did within three months of the first request. Measuring the number of ideas submitted, votes on each idea as well as further comments is a great way of understanding the power of your customer community. But of course, this is a big-brand exemplar, and you have to ask yourself: what would you think of Dell if it wasn’t doing something like this?

Return on investment

Overall, though, can we tie back our efforts to meeting business objectives? Jeremiah Owyang thinks so. He cites three critical measures to monitor in order to justify investment in social media:

1. Improvement in marketing efficiency (through greater amplification of your message);
2. Reduction in support costs (avoiding the costly call centre or a visit to the store);
3. Improvement to sales (subject to a robust tracking capability, of course).

With determination and thought, I am certain that most organisations will be able to use these three measures above to compare the investment they are making in social media with business outcomes

The future

Sterne at the beginning of the book promises not to be an evangelist for social media, and for the most part he keeps his word. But at the end of the book, the inevitable crystal ball-gazing chapter, John McKean of the Centre for Information Based Competition points out our central false assumptions. Our current thinking is based on the belief that innovation is occurring within the organisation.

In fact, McKean argues, “..the vast proportion of innovation is happening on the “buy side” of consumer interactions. The “sell” side innovations are progressively less and less.”. Organisations have failed to address their audiences in anything measuring like a success, when fail-to-respond rates are between 95%-98%. Instead of organisations continuing to try and ‘guess’ what the consumer wants, the efficient response is that consumers communicate their needs through a “consumer initiated dance (C2B) of Search, Find (engage) and Negotiate.”  Like many codas to technology marketing books, only time will tell, but suffice to say when visits to Google are now being rivalled by those to Facebook, searchability is being replaced by socialability.

Evaluation

Jim Sterne has done an excellent job in pulling together many important strands from the body of, often self-inflated, research and practice of social media. He has stripped out much of the puffery in the debate, and concentrated on the fundamentals. Sterne has constructed a stirring narrative, whilst tying technology, techniques and tools back to their impact on the business.  The shape of the book, like an old-fashioned sales funnel, gives us confidence that what has been included is useful and important to business outcomes. He has charted some difficult territory – data quality, sentiment analysis as well as old and the new of social media.

However, there are a few gaps which could have done with plugging. The book title includes the term ‘optimisation’, and for my money, there were few examples of this. I would like to have seen a few case studies where businesses had ‘measured’ their social media efforts, understood that they were sailing off course, and taken corrective action to ‘optimise’ and get better results. By concentrating only on the ‘measurement’ side of the equation, the book feels slightly lopsided.

Secondly, a good number of the examples were B2C and featured the global brands. I know there is some value in featuring case studies from household names with household products, but I fear this is somewhat short-sighted. Many of the people reading this book will be responsible for business-to-business marketing programs, and will want to be inspired by these stories, no matter whether the brand name is global or not. In fact, some small business owners will see social media as an opportunity to compete on a more level playing field with their more well-resourced competitors, and would be interested to hear more about businesses who have taken on the goliaths in their sector.

Finally, I would have liked to see a greater exploration of Owyang’s maturity model. The model presented lacked depth and does not bear comparison with Stephane Hamel’s Web Analytics Maturity Model. Allied with this shortcoming, would have been a more detailed consideration of how to resource social media marketing – what type of people make great community managers, where to find them, how to define their responsibilities, what organisational  guidelines should exist for using social media  – all of these would have been important questions to answer.

These gaps notwithstanding, Sterne has written an important book about how we will measure social media and evaluate the results of our efforts. It deserves to be on the bookshelf of every serious marketer.