I have just posted my latest Folksy item on facebook, I noticed that it had 154 views, I’m not saying that it should have got at least 1 like, but I thought possibly it might. So has facebook changed ,as it doesn’t seem worth the time and effort to post on there ,or am i doing something wrong. Your answers might also give me a clue as to why my sales have totally dried up for a year. Please be frank in your answers ,I appreciate it and can take it.
Paul
Hi Paul
I’ve all but given up on Facebook promoting.
I think they’ve gotten very clever at almost hiding our posts if there’s a faint clue we are promoting. They want us to pay with the promise of our post reaching far more people.
I’m only a small little business so I’m not really in a position to pay for promotion… maybe one day 
i felt like I was talking to myself when I posted 
Many people have done well building up a great customer base from the good old days years back, but I’ve not used Facebook for long. Just over a year I think, and things have never been great.
It’s just not as easy as it was some years back. More people are crafting, more people using social media, social media picking up on this and starting to change the way they share our posts & offering advertising packages.
I much prefer twitter & Instagram 
Karen x
Facebook want you to pay for advertising and so any posts which feature words that they associate with selling (sale, shop for example) tend to get limited in terms of reach - have a look at the language that Susan uses on British Crafters to see what she avoids. If I am posting about adding something to folksy I would say ‘now added to folksy’ rather than ‘now added to my folksy shop’ to avoid using shop and its potential limiting effects.
It might be worth changing how you use facebook to get people interested in your posts again (I had a look and there was a lot of ‘just listed on folksy’ type posts). I use facebook to show people new deliveries of rocks/ beads, works in progress, commissions and as a result I’ve sold things before I’ve even made them as people have fallen in love with the unset rocks or the piece that someone else has commissioned and asked me to make something for them. Could you add posts about works in progress to get people interested in a product before it hits your shop? (have a look at fiona T’s facebook page for examples of how that can work https://www.facebook.com/fionaTembroidery/)
Sasha
Hi Paul
I am always posting on my Facebook page and have had a couple of sales from there.
To be honest I don’t know if it is because FB are limiting the amount of views it is letting us have.
My posts only ever seem to get seen by followers already following my page.
(and they are mainly made up of friends and friends of friends).
I’m certain that you are not doing anything wrong, I just think that FB is controlling what the general public see so that they can force us to use promoted listings and their site Shopify.
I’m going to carry on using it though as some of my customers from another selling platforms that I use have also left me reviews on there and I just want them to stay updated with my page…just in the vain hope that they come back to me again!..lol. (I’m very new on this site so not getting any hits yet)
I’m getting the same sort of view results on FB as you, so I’m on your wavelength.
Cheers
Michaela
I do quite well out of Facebook as far as sales are concerned. I very rarely add the word shop or sale in my posts like @SashaGarrett says. I put a picture of my tulips on and shared it to loads of groups and within a few hours I’d sold all 7 to one customer and I’ve also had a commission order for them too. I stopped paying for ads as it doesn’t bring you many sales. I promote more on there than anywhere else now and will continue to. I have built up quite a good customer base.
I think aside from reach, wording etc the vast majority of views are going to be from fellow crafters who are not necessarily potential buyers , as we all tend to promote in the same groups.
While this will bring occassional sales it’s still a very limited audience.
Ironically, I’ve just been having a conversation IRL on this very subject with by OH. For me, FB is a non-event, because I have no friends who are likely to buy from me.
About a month ago I splashed out £4 for a Facebook ad. I did get more views than usual (which isn’t saying much), and 3 or 4 likes, but I didn’t get any sales.
On the other hand, I don’t want to offend anyone, but the odd posting about your work is fine, but I do get fed up with the constant postings some people send. (Sorry)
My Facebook page is at times incredibly successful. However, it doesn’t seem to convert to sales on here.
For instance, I put up a photo on Sunday on and so far it has had over 11000 veiws and nearly 200 likes. I also put it onto two textile groups, it has had over 1000 likes on one group and over 750 likes on another. And a total of about 267 comment, and hundreds of shares. All this without paying for advertising and yet I haven’t had a sale on Folksy since April 13th, and this month seems extremely slow. I also use Instagram and the same photo has had 138 likes. Pinterest seems to get the most clicks through to my Folksy page other than direct traffic from Folksy itself. But still no sales! So @norfolkwoodcrafts it probably isn’t worth it, but I shall still continue using social media. My veiws are still good on here, it’s quite frustrating, I really don’t think I can do much else, unless anyone else knows differently.
Hi Paul! Sadly FB is a law unto itself! I was going to share your post to BC’s page but we are having a “brights” day so I shared this instead https://www.facebook.com/260054134113562/photos/a.260054880780154.57040.260054134113562/889531091165860/?type=3&theater Every little helps & all that
I’ve paid for promotion with Facebook ads a few times but like Christine has just mentioned, with very little success. As for sales drying up over this past year,I think most sellers (myself included) are experiencing this. In the good old days, used to get lots of sales without any promotion except for posting on Pinterest occasionally. I now use Facebook, Twitter, (Craftjuice sometmes) and Pinterest for less than half the sales.
My sales completely dried up in January (my last sale was the 16th Jan 
) My busy months are usually October to the end of March, so this year so far has been unusually quiet for me, a lot of us are definitely feeling it at the moment. I used to use my Facebook page loads, but never really got any sales from there, I’ve not done anything with it for a couple of years though since FB changed the rules, it took too much of my knitting time up with no results (I also work full time in another job too, so couldn’t keep spending every night on FB for no results plus fitting my knitting in there too). I did get sales from my personal page though and my lovely friends sharing my posts. I’ve fallen out of ‘like’ with FB a bit and don’t go on there much at all nowadays.
I love Instagram and post a lot on there, and use it for knitting, life and all sorts of photos.
I’m hoping for a very cold spell in the weather or lots of people deciding they want tea cosies, otherwise, I’ll end up knitting myself even more shawls (already of my 5th one this year! )
Fingers crossed for us all!
Natalie xx
I also love Instagram, it’s so visual, quirky and less hard sell than other platforms, popping over now to find your page x
it’s so funny you said that sasha,
my reach has been pretty diabolical since my “internet comeback” earlier this year - 6000+ people like my page (mostly from the olden days), but my reach is anywhere between 87 - 500.
last night, absolutely exhausted, i posted that work in progress picture, captioned i"stuffing stuff"
(because i thought “oh i really cba - what is the point”)
… massive reach! bizarre.
maybe the lesson here is;
we should stop fretting & paying too much attention to tricksy social media?
Facebook is an enigma at the moment - there appears to be no rhyme nor reason to what gets lots of views and what gets not so many!
I’ve decided to just enjoy posting what I fancy!
I hadn’t even noticed the stats for likes/ dislikes until recently and having seen 4 people dislike my page one day this week, I looked to see what I had posted that could have been offensive/ annoying and I couldn’t really fathom that out either. I’ve given up trying to figure it all out - lol!
Its not about reaching lots of people, its about reaching the right people (or maybe just stalking a few fun ones, have you noticed you get me from both of my FB accounts?). Now how to find the ‘right’ people…
From what I’ve seen, you need to invest a lot of time and effort into creating a relationship with your audience of whatever social media platform you choose. This doesn’t come easily to many people, understanding your audience and getting people interacting with you is hard work!
Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly active users, so it has to streamline what posts get seen and by whom, so they use algorithms. I know that with the pages I have “liked”, I don’t always see their posts because FB assumes if I haven’t interacted in a certain period of time with the posts on that page, then I’m not actually interested, so will hide it. Based on my previous interaction history, it decides what to show me. This is why trading "likes for likes’ or similar can actually damage reach, because those people very rarely come back and actually interact with your page afterwards. Want you want are genuine people who are interested not in just what you do, but you and your brand. I don’t think anyone likes just to see “listing” and “for sale in my shop” posts.
I sympathise, it is hard, I haven’t cracked it because I just don’t spend enough time on it consistently, and even less now since I started working full time last autumn.
for realsies, @SashaGarrett (hehe, you are my ideal customer - one that just randomly found me, and then relentlessly(gently, patiently) pursued me until you got the thing <3 )
i had a similar experience to you @thedotterypotter - i looked to see what awful thing i must’ve posted one time, because it’d resulted in a clump of “unlikes”… it was something completely innocuous/ pretty in a month where i hadn’t posted much at all, so it made me anxious & cautious about saying anything at all.
i never looked again!
i think of facebook as a necessary evil.
and at worst it’s a good excuse for chitchat, gossip & netflix recommendations during stitchery breaks!
Wow ,what a response to my query, thankyou very much everybody for your opinions very interesting, I think everything points to the fact that F/B is not ideal but its there so you might as well use it, but don’t give any clues that you are selling stuff. Thanks Susan for putting my one and only bright box on British Crafters,thats very kind of you, its very chicken and egg ,if only I could sell a box It would finance some promotion on BC as I have done in the past. Sasha, thanks again ,you’re always on hand with useful tips, which I really appreciate as I am not very good at selling my stuff. I will try and not mention sales talk when posting on F/B. And thanks once again everybody for your help I hope you all get good sales.X
Paul
Very interesting to read this, I do not think I have really made sales from Facebook, despite having a fair few followers and an ok reach from time to time. However I started on Twitter a few months back, and have had my largest internet sale from that, a £270 commission based on an earlier window. New to Instagram, I am interested to see what happens there, but I have worked this out, and am happy to share it. My two biggest sales were to men. Do not limit yourselves to selling to women only, men spend money!! Think of products you can aim at the male market, or design your literature to say “for the womanin your world” etc …[quote=“fionaT, post:18, topic:13753”]
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