In short, posting on Facebook and Instagram and expecting lots of sales.
It simply won’t work.
“But everyone says post 3 times a day”
“Some bright spark came up with this and the Internet ran with it. It used to work years ago, but things have changed.”
Iain Calvert set up Boom Ecommerce Training to help businesses get over these hurdles.
The problem is the percentage of your followers that see a post is less than 5%. This geek speak is called “organic social reach”.
Add to that an average eCommerce conversion rate is 2% (percentage of visitors to your eCommerce site who purchase) means the amount of potential customers that visit your eCommerce site is basically zero!
Here is an example....
10,000 Followers (Assuming you haven’t bought any, because that is a waste of time too)
5% see your post
That means 500 people see it
The percentage of people that click through on average is well below 1%. But let's be generous and say it’s 1%
1% of 500 people who saw your post is 5.
Quick recap, from 10,000 followers your post has generated 5 website visitors.
Of those 5 visitors, you might get 2% to buy (Geek speak “Convert”)
That gives us a grand total of 0.1 sales per post (To be clear less than 1 sale)
“But what if I post more?”
Ok let's say you really go to town on posting. 10 times a day for example.
Using the same figures above if you have 10,000 followers And a conversion rate of 2% (Check that, cause it is high and common to be under 1%)
You’d make 1 sale a day.
You have had to come up with 10 posts for that 1 sale. Then you need to do that EVERYDAY!
In a year you’d have to post 3,650 times (10 a day every day), to make 365 sales.
Hopefully, you’re getting my point here.
Why is posting on social media so ineffective for generating eCommerce sales?
Posts are good for brand awareness, but brand awareness doesn’t pay the bills.
Years back the percentage of people who saw your posts “organic social reach” (remember that geek term from before) was much higher. So it was worth posting.
Facebook and Instagram did this to attract us, their customers, small businesses, to get “free marketing”. So we all lined up and did it. It was great. Empires were built and fortunes made.
Once Facebook had a captive audience (us small businesses) and then became a public company they had to start making money for their shareholders.
This meant charging us, the small business owners, to get our posts/ads seen. AKA paying to “boost” ads (those annoying little suggestions everytime you post).
Essentially if you don’t boost your posts or even better, run ads, it’s unlikely you’ll build eCommerce sales. You’ll make occasional ones, but nothing life changing.
There are always expectations, but this basically means being very provocative and outspoken, making you really stand out. I’m not talking handbags and shoes that don’t match or on the other end of the scale hate speech, but really going out on a limb.
This also isn't guaranteed to work.
How do I build my eCommerce sales then?
Quite simply do what Facebook and Instagram want, run ads on their platform.
It works really well and I’ve only ever worked with one successful eCommerce business, out of thousands, that didn’t use them extensively and they ranked in Google for highly searched for terms that were built up over 15 years.
The best way to get started is to do Facebook's free training called Facebooks Blueprint
So stop posting and hoping, and take action that will actually move the needle!