If you’re on Facebook promoting your craft products, you might be making these common mistakes and missing out on potential sales.

Keep reading this post so you can find out what those mistakes are, as well as how to fix them.

1. Check the Data

The first thing is, don’t post on Facebook blindly without looking at your data or analytics on a weekly basis.

I think a lot of people don’t think to look at their stats. The thing is, numbers don’t lie. Your stats can tell you when you’re doing something right and effective, versus when something you’re doing is less effective.

For example, looking at your stats by going into your Facebook Page Insights will show you which of your posts gets more reach and engagement. You can very quickly see which posts do better than others, and take the time to study why that might be the case.

Was it because your post was of your product photo on a white background? Or was it because you asked a question in your post? Was it because it was a video post or a photo post?

When you make this a habit to look at your insights, you can start to see patterns for what does well on your Facebook page.

There are some general tips I can share with you in this blog, but the specifics are going to be different for every page because every business and product and audience is different.

When you know what works well, you want to keep doing more of that.

I know most people hate Facebook’s algorithm and it’s really tough to get your posts seen by your fans. This is a very simple and fast way to instantly improve your Facebook Page reach and engagement.

2. Don’t Overshare

Don’t just share your own products every time. That would be similar to going to a party and you started talking to people, but you only talk about yourself.

Don’t be that person.

People don’t generally like people who only talk about themselves all the time. It doesn’t make other people feel good about themselves.

So what should you do?

• Ask other people questions
• Get to know them
• Be a listener
• Start conversations

That’s more interesting and will get people to remember you better in a positive way.

Remember, the bottom line is, it’s about how you make other people feel.

Taking this back to your Facebook page – it’s okay to promote your crafts on Facebook, but don’t do that every time you post. You want to mix things up and have diverse content types.

Post other people’s content. Share posts and videos from other large Facebook pages that are already getting great engagement.

You don’t have to create ALL the content on your page yourself.

Facebook actually likes it when you share other people’s posts occasionally. That’s why the share button exists.

It helps keep people browsing Facebook. At the end of the day, that’s Facebook’s number one goal and if you can help them do that, Facebook is going to treat you better in return by improving your reach and engagement.

Have a bookmark list of other Facebook pages that has an audience that’s similar to your audience so you have a constant stream of content to share.

The cool thing is, these pages have social proof on their posts in the form of likes, comments, and shares to tell you which of their posts are “viral”. Pay attention to those posts, because you definitely want to share those on your own page.

3. Don’t Leave them Hanging

Don’t leave your commenters hanging.

I’ve seen so many Facebook pages where people leave comments but the Facebook page owner never replies.

Number one, that doesn’t make people feel good because number two, you want to be building a sense of community on your Facebook page.

When you respond to people’s comments, you’re inviting them to come back to your page to respond to your reply, especially if you reply with a comment that’s opening a conversation to happen.

If you know anything about your algorithm, engagement is a big factor that Facebook considers when deciding how much reach to give your posts. The more engagement you have, the more reach you’ll have.

An easy way to increase your engagement is by talking back to the people who are already talking to you.

Even if your fans didn’t ask questions, even if it was just them saying how awesome your post was, or if they tagged a friend in your post. Take the time to tell them thank you.

This shows them that you’re there, you listen, you’re present and people love knowing that you’re there mingling with them and not just sitting in your CEO office, detached from your people.

Not to mention, some people think it’s really cool when the Facebook page responds to your comments.

We live in an age where we just assume when we leave a comment, we probably won’t get a reply. It’s a really nice thing to do for your people. It makes them feel seen and heard.

4. Consistency is Key

Don’t be inconsistent when posting on Facebook.

Facebook, like all other forms of marketing, greatly benefits from having momentum. When you start and stop and start and stop, that’s not doing you any favors.

You’ll find that when you post more consistently, Facebook favors your page and starts to show your content to more of your fans.

This doesn’t mean you have to post extremely frequently. I used to post four times a day and when I went back down to just posting once a day, I actually saw my engagement and reach go up because I was able to spend more time focusing on the quality of my content and making sure it was really good rather than spreading myself too thin.

If you’ve done some Facebook posting in the past, but because you didn’t see anything come of it, you might have let your Facebook page slide a bit then when you try to come back to it, it’s normal to see a decline in reach and engagement because you’ve lost your momentum.

Now you have to work extra hard to bring that momentum back up again. Once you’ve got that momentum, you want to keep posting consistently so that you’re MAINTAINING that momentum.

A couple easy ways to help with this is to have a set schedule of what types of content you want to post on which days, and then bulk schedule those posts out every week or few weeks.

That’s the biggest tip I can share with you about being consistent in your business. Bulk schedule and automate things upfront so your business doesn’t rely on your daily effort to keep running.

I’m a terribly inconsistent person. Some mornings I wake up feeling motivated to work on my business, some days I just don’t want to even think about it.

That’s totally normal, so don’t let your business become a victim of your humanness.

Facebook has a built-in scheduler, so definitely use that to schedule your posts. When you use a third party schedule for Facebook, they know that because you have to connect that app with your Facebook page, and you will generally see less reach and engagement that way.

5. Don’t Make it All About You

This goes back to posting about your products only all the time. Don’t be that person at the party that only talks about themselves.

I’ve seen Facebook pages that only ever post about their products, and yes, people follow your page because they’re interested in your products, but when you don’t give people variety, they get bored.

That’s one of the core human needs according to Tony Robbins.

When your Facebook fans get bored, they stop engaging with your posts and that means, your engagement drops and your reach will drop in turn.

A good mix of content I practice right now is I alternate posting other content that has nothing to do with my product and then posting my products every other day.

This is something that’s counterintuitive for a lot of creative business owners. But when you start a business, it’s very natural to want to talk about yourself and your shop and your products, because that’s how you think you’ll make sales.

You talk about your stuff.

But going back to the analogy of being at a party or networking event: when you flip things around and make it about the other person first (the other person being your potential customer on Facebook) they are going to be 1000% much more likely to want to listen to what you have to say, so that when you do post about your products, they are there, ready to listen and buy.

How do you make it about your customers first? By understanding what they want and what interests them.

You’re building an online community that shares a similar interest in not just your products but in the niche you are in.

I sell tiny scented food jewelry, so naturally, my niche is in foods and cute things. That’s what my people love.

I’ll entertain them with posts about those things first, which will increase my engagement and reach and make it more likely that people will buy my stuff.

If you’re not sure what types of content your audience is interested in, try several different ideas using some of your best guesses, then look at your insights so you can see which ideas are getting you the best reach and engagement.

Rinse and repeat and continue testing and looking at the data.

Eventually, you’re going to have such a great handle on who your customers are and what they like to see.

For example, with my people, they’re not into JUST food content.

• They’re not interested in foods from international cultures
• They’re not interested in savory foods
• They like seeing posts about sweet foods, but not just any kind of sweet foods. They love colorful, decadent, mesmerizing content about sweet foods.

I know this so well because I’ve tested lots of different things out. Some of the things I’ve posted, I thought was amazing, but my Facebook fans didn’t care about it.

It’s so important that you put yourself aside, and post stuff that your audience cares about first. The sales will follow.

6. Don’t Ask for Tags, Comments, or Shares

This is a new tricky thing that takes a bit of practice to get good at.

If you’ve been around the block for some time, you’ll know that including a call to action in your Facebook posts will encourage people to engage with your post.

A call to action like, “tag a friend below who loves bacon”. People did this a lot in previous years, and now, Facebook has explicitly said that they don’t like posts that do that because it’s not getting people to naturally want to engage.

You’re in a way, fake forcing it to happen.

While it IS very effective at raising engagement, Facebook’s algorithm knows when you do this, and will actively try to prevent you from doing it again.

I don’t think you’ll get banned or your Facebook page closed down because of this, but there is a fairly easy way to keep doing this without getting on Facebook’s bad side.

So instead of being specific about how or what you want people to do, like “tag a friend who loves bacon”. Instead, just ask a question. “Who loves bacon?” That is just as effective and you can see how it also just sounds more natural, like you’re just having a conversation.

Questions in your posts do really great for engagement.

7. Don’t Broadcast. Engage

Broadcasting in your posts is like, you’re just telling people something. Which is fine to do fundamentally. Sometimes we just have announcements or information we want to share with our audience. But whenever you can, try to open up the conversation by engaging, and the way to do this is by asking questions.

You will always get more comments when you ask questions. Here are some examples.

This post of my cinnamon roll necklace is just me announcing that I’m craving cinnamon rolls.

There’s no question in it, and you can see how many people this post reached. Only about 2,400 reached and 44 engagements.

Another thing I want you to pay attention to here is I used a photo of my product on a white background, which some people might argue to say it’s less engaging overall.

Here is this other one is of a super cute photo of my egg and bacon necklaces on a patterned background, which usually gets really good engagement because people love breakfast food and people especially love bacon.

But all the post said was “BFF’s”. And it only got 1,400 reached and 40 engaged.

It actually got lower engagement than the cinnamon roll on white background one.

Now compare those with this pecan pie post.

It’s on a white background, and it says, “This is my favorite pie. What’s yours?”

I’m not saying “leave a comment below with your favorite pie”. I’m being very conversational and I have a comment in my post.

You’ll also notice, my posts aren’t super long. They don’t have to be.

This post got more than double the reach and engagement of the other posts I just showed you. This one got 4,400 reached and 193 engaged.

Here’s another good example, and you’ll see how these are all posts of my own products. This post is a group photo of a bunch of cheesecake necklaces and I had a question in there asking if I should bring this necklace back to my shop.

5,300 reached with over 300 engaged.

Do you see a pattern? The posts that did well had easy to answer questions in them. Try this out the next time you post on Facebook. 

Leave a comment below with your favorite tip that I shared from this post!