WooCommerce: Encourage product sharing in exchange for discounts

It’s hard to imagine our life without social networks.

Whether it’s for work or for fun, almost 1 and half billion users are active on facebook every month on an average time of 40 minutes each day for American users.

Forty minutes might not seem long, but considering the average time users spend on a website is 15 seconds, it’s easy to understand it’s actually a lot of time in proportion.

This means that every person spends around 250 hours every year on Facebook, that would be more than 10 days straight, 24 hours a day.

With this kind of data at hand it’s easy to understand why Facebook (and other social networks) are a real goldmine for those who, like us, work on the internet.

For this reason, companies and online vendors can use three different strategies

Create a Facebook page to attract customers and interact with them

As basic as this point might sound, given that every online store (and not) should have a Facebook page, the mechanics of the world’s number one social network aren’t helpful.

Lately especially, the visibility of Facebook pages has  changed and was limited to a low percentage.

The owners of these pages often can’t reach out to more than 50% of those who “liked” their page and are often stuck at 20/30%.

Why does it work this way? There are many theories, some more likely than others, that I’m not going to discuss in this article.

The point I’m trying to make is that despite we just can’t do without social networks, a Facebook page is an imperfect service.

Implement your store into the Facebook page

Obviously this strategy suffers the consequences of point 1, and not only that.

Despite the fact that integrating your store on your Facebook page is a good thing, since customers are not forced to click any links and leave Zuckerberg’s platform, which rises the chance of your products gaining more visibility, this service also has negative aspects among which:

• It’s less professional than a website – An app on a Facebook page could be ideal for a small time vendor, an artisan or a creator of content with only a handful of products, but if you want to look professional, nothing looks better than your own handcrafted website.
• It’s bad for big stores – Imagine having 20000 products for sale… a small platform intagrated on Facebook is not ideal to show them all.

I don’t think this service is a definitive solution for your visibility problem… So what else can you do? How can you reach the potential one and a half billion users Facebook sees every day? Not to mention other social network such as Instagram, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, etc…

Encouraging the sharing of your products on social networks using WooCommerce

One of the most powerful tools to exploit the potential of social networks is encouraging customers to share your products on their profile.

To what extent is this a useful feature?

• It uses the full reach (still unmatched) of Facebook profiles: If a FB user has 600 friends, then he can reach potentially up to 600 people, with just one share.
• It creates a chain reaction: if among these 600 users there are even just a couple who will in turn share your product, then you started a potential wave of shares.
• It exploits your customers’ loyalty. “It wasn’t the manufacturer or the seller, who have personal interest in the product, who shared it. No, it was a friend/relative/neighbor… Them, I can trust!”
• It allows you to increase your visibility beyond regular customers and people who already “liked” your page, which will widen your circle of users.

So you get it: it’s a powerful tool: but how can you convince your customers to share the content of your website?

First of all, it’s very important that your website displays buttons for social network sharing, and that is often not enough… so what else?

The best way to encourage sharing is to offer a discount in exchange for one share on a social media platform, this will indeed rise the amount of shares and encourage the sharer to purchase from you thanks to the discount voucher code you gave them.

This will also keep customers loyal to your store since they are going to feel rewarded for something so simple as sharing, which still felt important to you.

And don’t forget the potential of other social networks! Twitter, for instance, is getting more and more users… It would be a shame not to use it!

Ultimately, if you have a WooCommerce based store, you can implement this function using a simple plugin: WooCommerce Share for Discount, which allows you to handle the sharing process > discount voucher  process automatically, without having to contact every one of your customer personally (which proves impossible, especially in case you have many… which is what you aim for, right?)

“Work smarter not harder“, let your customers spread the word about your services!