How to Make Money on Facebook in 2024

Depending on your location, you will see a wide variety of goods and services for selling on the Facebook Marketplace. These are listed in categories ranging from Home and Garden through to Vehicles and Bikes.

Source: facebook.com

A Facebook user can select the geographical area from which they see products for sale. For instance, you can set it to display goods for sale within a fixed distance of your home. You can also filter by price.

You could earn some money by placing your spare goods on the Facebook Marketplace. You may have to enter into negotiations with people, so be sure to keep in mind the lowest price at which you are willing to sell.

Similarly, there Buy and Sell groups on Facebook in most regions. You can make posts selling your spare goods in these groups. They often have a common core of members, and therefore suffer less haggling from people trying to get a bargain.

Many businesses discover that this can be tricky. It is not easy to build a high enough Relevance Score for your page’s posts to appear in your followers’ news feeds.

Therefore to make money on Facebook using your fan page you need to create and share content that people value on a regular basis. As Kim Garst says, her Facebook Selling Formula is

If you engage in Facebook influencer marketing, your influencers can help you with this. They can provide useful and authentic content, and direct their supporters to your fan page. 

You could consider adding some Facebook advertising to improve the reach of your sales posts. But don’t forget, to build up an organic audience, the bulk of your posts cannot be sales-oriented. They need to be valuable and/or entertaining to your potential audience.

With Facebook Advertising it’s essential to remember where most Facebook users are in the Buying Cycle. They are not using the platform with an aim to buy anything at all. It is not like advertising on Google, where potential buyers search for terms to help them make a purchase. People come to Facebook to chat with their friends, catch up with what their acquaintances are doing, and watch funny cat videos – not to buy your product.

Therefore it is your responsibility to build a sales funnel. To do this you want to reach as broad an audience as possible – so you should share a variety of content. Provide a mix of links to quality blog posts, videos, funny anecdotes, controversial statements, infographics, and anything else you think will attract people to you. They should, in some way, relate to the product you are promoting – or at very least the type of people who would be interested in your product.

Once you have created a base of supporters (either by yourself or with the help of influencers), you should start promoting content to them. Pay attention to the engagement levels on these posts, and share more of the type of material with the highest engagement.

You should then consider promoting content in ads targeted to Lookalike Audiences. Although these people will probably never have heard of you before, they have demonstrated from their past activities that they have similar interests to the people who have followed you. Therefore it shouldn’t be too complicated to attract these audiences with your content.

Although there is little value in running a Facebook group with the sole focus of making sales, they can be a useful way in which to let people know what you offer.

Facebook Groups can be particularly useful if you sell information products. You can set up a group, encouraging members to help each other and share ideas. Once again you need to ensure that you offer group members useful content, and every so often you can suggest your product as a solution to their problems.

Facebook Groups can also work well as an offshoot to other activities. For instance, if your product is a course or an eBook, you could run a Facebook Group for members of your class or people who have bought your eBook.

If you provide paid coaching, you could use a Facebook Group as a place where your clients can come together. You could perhaps even operate it as a Mastermind group.

Neil Patel has written a detailed Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Facebook Sales Funnel. Like most other commentators he emphasizes the importance of building up gradually to a Facebook sale.

Neil believes there to be a seven-step funnel required for you to earn money on Facebook. In essence, his seven steps are:

1. Create a variety of quality of content for your “warm audience” – those people who have already expressed an interest in you or your product
2. Create a “Lookalike Audience” of people with the same interest as your warm audience
3. Promote high-quality content to that “Lookalike Audience.”
4. Some of the “Lookalike Audience” will like what they see, and become a fan of your Facebook page. Some may even choose to buy your product at this point
5. Use a Facebook Pixel and  remarket to those who have not yet purchased any products
6. Continue remarketing to those who have still not converted
7. Maximise your conversions

Many brands struggle to build the numbers necessary to earn money from facebook. In this situation, it is common for firms to turn to influencers for help.

Influencers have done the hard graft of building a following. Anybody who is now a Facebook influencer started off a “Facebook nobody.” However, they took the time to establish themselves in a niche, and they have gone through the necessary steps to build authority and trust, and therefore a following.

They know that they can join partnerships with brands, spreading the brands’ messages in ways that would otherwise be impossible for the brands. The most essential requirement is that the brand makes a good fit for the influencer's followers.

Influencers can deliver sponsored content to their fans. They may also work more directly by sharing affiliate links.

Sometimes influencers can promote products in a more subtle, perhaps humorous way. In the UK The Meat Man, who sells meat to the public and restaurants, paid a UK Facebook influencer Brad Holmes, to make a funny prank video. In the clip, Brad pranks his fiancé into thinking she had ordered 500kg of chicken instead of 5kg – with a £2,000 bill to go with it. The Meat Man’s product sits in clearly labeled boxes in full view throughout the video.

This Facebook influencer drove 7 million video views within 48 hours, and also led to newspaper coverage for The Meat Men. As a comparison, The Meat Man’s own Facebook page has only about 10,000 likes and could never have generated as much publicity on its own.

Perhaps the best solution for a business is to build up its Facebook page, but at the same time work with influencers to kickstart the process, and give the reach that most brands can’t achieve alone.