Shelly’s penchant for viewing Facebook Stories (that place atop your News Feed where users usually post photos) opened a curiosity door to her one day. She runs a small jewelry business and thought that she could showcase her latest ware on her Stories Feed. Voila! A viewer swiped up and asked how much she sold a piece of a jewelry, which caught her fancy. Like a dream, Shelly sold one of her priciest jewelry. It struck her. She could convert the platform to a marketing one.
She decided to design a little advertorial and uploaded on her Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stories. On an average, she has a cumulative 800 – 1,000 views across the platforms everyday. She converted them to a money-spinning platforms. According to her, she makes at least 10 sales weekly, depending on how many views she garners across the platfoms.
Social media has made it easy to transact genuine business across borders. No other platform has the widest reach than Facebook with its over 2 billion monthly active users and its other family apps of WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
In April this year, Facebook announced that its stories section has hit 500 million users. About 150 million people use Facebook Stories on a daily basis. That is a huge market for users to advertise their products or services.
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Although Facebook plans to monetize that section anytime soon, users outside the U.S. can leverage on Facebook Stories’ versatility to attract and retain customers for their products or service.
Facebook remains the biggest e-commerce platform in the world with over two billion people using the platform on a monthly basis.
Across all the platforms of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, Facebook has offered users enormous opportunity to reach more audience and attract more customers.
WhatsApp stories feature status also averages 500 million users and Instagram hit a milestone in December last year. That means Facebook’s 1.56 billion daily users are posting or watching stories each day, up from zero when Facebook launched the feature in 2017.
The company announced recently that it would soon introduce ads on its WhatsApp Status to give users more opportunity to reach a wider audience. The feature is being rolled out in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market. About 300 million people use the platform in that country. It is also testing a payment feature via WhatsApp in the country.
In August, Facebook announced a new suite of tools for its 40 million active businesses on Messenger, including appointment bookings, lead generation and others which it announced this year at the F8 developer conference.
“We want to make it more seamless for people to reach out to businesses on Messenger in places where they’re already looking to connect,” explains Facebook.
“We will put more investment into tools to connect people and businesses, including updates to m.me links, web plugins, various entry points across our family of apps, as well as ad products, that lead to Messenger,” the company said.
If you give people a place to put their face at the top of their friends’ phones, they’ll fill it. And if someone dangles a window into the lives of people you know and people you wish you did, you’ll open that window regularly. That sums up the reason advertising on Facebook Stories will strike an instant chord with customers.
Facebook isn’t just using Stories to keep people engaged, but to squeeze more cash out of them. Chief Operating Officer, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that three million advertisers have now bought Stories ads across Facebook’s family of apps.
“I’d expect Facebook to launch a Stories Ad Network soon so other apps can show Facebook’s vertical video ads and get a cut of the revenue,” she said.
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The opportunity to reach a wider audience through the various Facebook platforms increased when the company said more people are logging in daily to its platforms across developing countries.
“Instead of users just posting their pictures just to show off their faces and stuff, Facebook Stories is a platform to showcase their crafts and business,” Tony Nwoko said.
“If people cannot afford to advertise on what I call traditional e-commerce platforms like Jumia or Konga; Amazon and Alibaba, Facebook Stories is a huge platform to do so,” Nwoko said.
Nwoko also said he knows people who use Facebook platforms to transact serious and legitimate businesses without breaking too much sweat.
