Something like one month ago I put up the now-famous “Facebook Like Button” on a business I run called HouseOfRave.com.
House Of Rave is an eEommerce company that sells light up and glow stuff. Simple enough (see how it works).
The Facebook Like Button is a simple button people can press, and it will automatically “Like” a particular web address on their Facebook Feed. It puts a small sentence saying, “Neville Medhora likes WhateverTheLinkIs” on your Facebook.
I did a little poking around and found the Like Button was really easy to install on the Shopsite shopping cart software I use. To install it on your site, simply Google the term:
“How to install the Facebook Like Button on (insert your platform here)”
…and you’ll surely find a solution. It took me about 3 minutes to install, and 2 minutes to test if everything was working correctly. It turned out looking like this on every product of HoR:
Obviously the number of “Likes” varies from page to page.
Now this was just a simple test to see what would happen….and I was surprised to see that some of my product pages already had several “Likes” on Facebook. Off to a good start!
Now a month later, some of the more prominent products on HoR have been gaining traction. The Finger Lights above currently have 100+ Likes!…meaning somewhere on Facebook exist 100+ links to this product (most likely buried in the archives of people’s news feeds).
So the results of the inflow of traffic were as follows (there was already a small amount of traffic coming from Facebook, so the numbers aren’t that skewed:
WHAT I FOUND INTERESTING was that Facebook users clicking on their friends links to House Of Rave were pretty decent traffic.
The traffic had slightly higher bounce rates than the average visitor, fewer pages per visit and spent less time on the site than average, but….
It’s FREE traffic I didn’t do a DAMN thing to acquire!
Sweet :-)
The cool thing is, even if the conversion rate is much lower than the site average…SOME of the visits do convert, and in the first few weeks I noticed hundreds of extra dollars in revenue due to that completely free traffic.
That was revenue that didn’t exist before, but does now.
Those were customers who didn’t exist before, but do now.
This is a new channel of free traffic that didn’t exist before, but does now.
…all for 5 minutes of work!
As people start using Like buttons more and more, it could even become more profitable.
So Facebook Like Button…for making me free money while I do NOTHING….I LIKE you!
P.S. An unexpected benefit I noticed is that products with lots of “Likes” are getting slightly better conversion rates now. It seems people trust the Like button because the website owner cannot manipulate the numbers themselves.