Facebook 'Pages' Function opens up shop to the World

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Facebook have announced that Facebook Pages will soon allow online sales, in a move expected to be welcomed by online businesses.

The popular social media website could potentially offer organisations access to the largest marketplace in the world, after Facebook recently made headlines for over 1 billion active users in the space of 24 hours. The competition is also likely to be fierce however, with over 45 million pages already in existence vying for attention.

Facebook pages currently include an option for a ‘Call to Action’ button like this one, allowing visitors to ‘Contact Us’, ‘Sign Up’, with similar ‘Donate’ options for non-profits, which will all receive a redesign.

Over the next month however, Pages will be granted access to new ‘Shopping’ and ‘Services’ sections, allowing a business to showcase their products for purchase or a range of professional services for hire. Additionally, Facebook are understood to be testing a voice-activated AI ‘assistant’ service, ‘M’, for both Facebook and the Facebook Messenger App, keeping pace with similar offerings from other giants of the tech world.

It would be a brave business which moved to Facebook sales alone, although some startups may attempt just that, eventually processing all payments through social media as a replacement for a traditional website.

But as the old saying goes: ‘Where there’s crowds, there’s business.’ A conventional internet banner advert is clicked-on merely 0.1% of the time, or one in a thousand views, perhaps tempting internet savvy companies to move more of their efforts to Facebook, a website millions of users log into (willingly) each day.

If you need technology to drive sales for your business, why not get in touch with Lineal? Contact us here: http://www.lineal.co.uk/contact/