The newsfeed has dominated how users have absorbed information from businesses on Facebook for the past decade. Now, it seems the company is ready to revitalize Facebook Pages and transform them into commerce destinations where users can not only quickly grab business info, but as of today, also buy stuff.
Today, Facebook made a pretty clear statement that Pages is shifting to become a major priority for them in terms of user traffic. BuzzFeed reported that the company had recently started testing shops with ‘buy buttons’ inside of Facebook Pages.
It’s been over a year since Facebook started testing its buy button in ads on the newsfeed, and it appears that the company is now ready to take the service to its next logical progression with dedicated shops on Pages where users can browse for and purchase items.
BuzzFeed reports:
The shops are still in the testing phase, but some already feature “buy” buttons that allow the entire shopping experience to occur within Facebook — from product discovery to checkout.
“With the shop section on the page, we’re now providing businesses with the ability to showcase their products directly on the page,” Facebook product marketing manager Emma Rodgers told BuzzFeed News.
Facebook is joining several other social media giants, including Pinterest and Twitter, that are shifting to tackle commerce. Today, Google unveiled its own buy button to be built into its ads.
This is a pretty major step in Facebook’s marked plans to take over ecommerce and turn pages into destinations where users can go to grab the information they need and make quick orders. With Facebook’s recent efforts of adding business hours and OpenTable integrations, it’s clear that the shop feature is the next step towards making Pages a more visible part of the user experience.
If Facebook can revitalize Pages and shift some of the attention (and traffic) from the newsfeed to them, then the company has the potential to neutralize companies like Yelp and FourSquare that have largely done a better job at crafting business landing pages for users to visit and quickly grab relevant info.
This change has major potential to shift how users interact with businesses, Facebook is already completely altering how users discover posts from pages that they follow.
It’s clear that this feature could really change the type of content strategies that businesses use in pushing out information to users. Whereas the past decade’s social media strategies have focused on building up engagement and brand value, its unclear whether this overt focus on “making the purchase” will shift businesses to approach Facebook Pages more like their own traditional websites.