Five Fantastic Free Facebook Apps for eCommerce Sites

Internet Marketing, Social Media — By BS Free Marketing on December 14, 2010 8:03 pm

Often online merchants are confused about how to use social media to increase or enhance their business. Facebook, twitter and other social sites scream for interaction and these free Facebook apps can help business owners get more involved and do so at a a price everyone can afford…free!

Tabfusion

Tabfusion provides a free graphical editor called TabMaker that allows Fan page owners to design a custom page without knowledge of HTML or other coding languages. Once a page is created in the editor, the page owner simply clicks the “source” button, and then copies and pastes the resulting HTML code into the Fan page using the free staticFBML app.

MailChimp

MailChimp has an app available for its users that creates a mailing list sign-up form and tab on the Fan page. It also allows list administrators to auto-post campaigns to the Wall once they are sent.

When users sign-up on this app, it automatically adds them to the list the administrator has designated. After the sign up process, subscribers receive a confirmation email from MailChimp to confirm their intentions.

Having your subscribe form connected to your Fan page is especially useful because it keeps fans from having to leave Facebook, or even your page, to sign up for the list.

Payvment

We discussed Payvment in-depth several months ago, in “Social Commerce Spotlight: Payvment, a Facebook Storefront Provider.” Payvment makes this list because, unlike other Facebook shopping carts, it is free to use.

Fans can shop and make purchases from a merchant’s Facebook store without the need to leave Facebook. Payments are routed through PayPal.

I have used Payvment with one client site and found setup to be relatively painless. However, the cart leaves something to be desired if you want to give users a highly customized appearance. But, then again, most of the Facebook shopping carts with which I am familiar allow only minimal customization.

VendorShop

VendorShop is another shopping cart that processes payment using PayPal. One advantage to this app is that you can manage multiple stores through a single dashboard, which is certainly a time-saver.

Networked Blogs

NetworkedBlogs enables page owners to import their blogs into the Fan page via an RSS feed. Each time a new post is added, a notice is sent to the Wall and to Fan’s news feeds.

NetworkedBlogs is also a directory of some 500,000 blogs, organized by topic or geographical location. When you install the app, your blog is automatically added to the directory.

Facebook Finish

While Facebook and these apps are ultimately just tools, similar to email and your mobile phone, it is how you use them that really counts. Staying proactive and being creative with your business can usually be the hardest task when promoting your service or product. Your marketing tools should be fun and keep you involved, or how can they attract new customer and clients? Facebook can turn users into paying clients but it takes time and involvement.

Give us your suggestions for tools you use for Facebook, free or not.

Portions of this reprinted from http://www.practicalecommerce.com

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Tags: auto post, business owners, campaigns, creative, email, facebook, fan page, mailchimp, marketing, merchants, paypal, shopping carts, Social Media, source button, storefront, twitter