How to Integrate WooCommerce with Social Media

In the last article, we covered how to optimize your WooCommerce site for SEO. While search engine marketing is critical to the success of your site, social media marketing might prove even more so.

Depending on the type of product you have, and the kind of demographics that you’re targeting, a social media marketing strategy could have a far greater impact on your sales than a strong search engine presence. And just like with search engines, you can use advertising to improve your visibility on social media, thus turbocharging your exposure.

In this article, I’ll show you how to get started with integrating your WooCommerce store with three social media networks – Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I won’t go into a great deal of depth regarding the integration, because once you get started, it’s not hard to figure out how to continue further. I’ll just get you going with the right plugins to use for each, along with a quick overview of how it works.

Integrating Facebook with WooCommerce

Facebook Shops is the first outlet you should explore for integrating WooCommerce and social media. While Facebook has lost some of its luster, mainly due to demographic changes and image-related issues (it’s no longer the new hot thing), it’s still a behemoth and can be a very lucrative source of a certain type of demographic if that’s who you’re targeting. To get started with Facebook integration with WooCommerce, download the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin. Once installed, you can go to the “Marketing” tab on your WordPress dashboard, and click “Facebook” as shown here:

This will ask to connect you to Facebook, so click “Get Started”:

Enter your login credentials on the next page, and start building your products.

Benefits of Integrating Facebook Shops:

Here are some benefits of Facebook shops:

#1: Unified Experience for Facebook and Instagram

Since Meta owns both Instagram and Facebook, you can leverage a single platform to display ads on both of them using the same database of products and collections. You don’t need to build your catalog on multiple sites and maintain them separately.

#2: Easy Checkout Right on Facebook

Ideally, you want people to purchase your products with as few redirections as possible. This is why Amazon’s “One-click purchase” works so well. With Facebook shops, you don’t need customers to come to your website separately to make a purchase. Instead, they can complete everyone right on the social network itself. Alternatively, the option still exists for you to redirect your visitors to your site to make the final purchase.

#3: Easy Insights and Analytics

Using Facebook shops, you can get detailed information about how your customers interact with your products and site. For example, you can see the number of views, clicks, and purchases. All these allow you to conduct tests to see what’s working and what’s ineffective, and you can play around with different formats and images to increase your visibility and appeal to your demographics.

#4: Integrated Messaging

In addition to Instagram and Facebook, Meta also owns WhatsApp, which means that you can use all these three channels of communication to improve your relationship with your customers. This is a distinct advantage of using the integrated social network app since there’s no comparable experience on a website, where the most you can have is a chatbot. But with integrated communications, you can receive and respond to customer requests for clarifications and bargaining almost immediately from any device.

#5. Live Shopping Streams

For an extra kick to your visibility, you can organize and host live shopping demos where your users can ask questions about the product in real-time, and can also place their orders right from the live stream itself. It opens up new avenues to interact with your audience and can be a powerful marketing tool in the right hands.

Integrating WooCommerce with Instagram

Instagram is a completely different experience for shopping compared to Facebook. While the former is more social and can have a distinctly political or conversational slant, Instagram is far more visual and strictly for entertainment. Unlike a platform like TikTok, users don’t use Instagram to spread politically conscious messages or live stream their thoughts – even though some celebrities do use it for that purpose.

Instead, Instagram is more light-hearted, and fun, and is known for being a “cleaner” version of TikTok. If your product appeals to your users’ aesthetics, and particularly if you have a good creative team, you can make it big on Instagram.

Instagram Integration with WooCommerce Follows Facebook

The good news is that if you’ve already integrated WooCommerce with Facebook as shown above, then you don’t need to take any additional steps for Instagram. The same product catalog that you create for one will be available when you work with the other. You can access the Facebook commerce manager to get started with creating your account.

Highlight the Products on Your Photos to Shop

One of the cool features of shopping with Instagram is that you can mark specific areas of your visual and link them to specific products. Think of a clothing ensemble, where each item on the picture is labeled and clickable. Or an interior decoration set-up where every piece of furniture and linen is clickable, so your customers can purchase them immediately.

Once again, this emphasizes Instagram’s appeal to aesthetically focused products. Even cooking products and pet-related items do well. If you’re able to create good artwork, Instagram works very well.

Need an Instagram Business Account

Just like you need to open a business account with PayPal to buy and sell products, you need to use a Business Instagram profile for your shop. You have access to Instagram for Businesses as long as you belong to one of the countries mentioned on this page.

If you have an existing Instagram account, you can easily convert it into a Business account, or just create a new one.

Because your Instagram shopping posts will intertwine with a user’s feed, you get a lot more attention compared to traditional marketing channels like Google ads.

Integrating WooCommerce with TikTok

TikTok’s demographic is very different from Instagram’s. While the latter is a bit more “luxury”, TikTok’s audience is younger and more trendy. While, of course, visual aesthetics are a vital factor in a product’s success, the vibe is less refined, more “edgy” and more natural. Even the integration page for WooCommerce and TikTok looks very different:

As you can see, you can use the same plugin for TikTok as you used for the previous two networks. Just log in and connect to your TikTok account, and get started.

Dynamic Showcase Ads on TikTok

TikTok’s unique features called “Dynamic Ads”, allow TikTok to take products from your catalog and showcase them to your users. These ads are videos that the system creates in real-time based on a template, and uses the power of AI and targeting to maximize their impact.

Just as with Instagram, you need to use a Business account to show ads like this:

Finish the setup and get started!

All-in-One Plugin for Social Media WooCommerce Integration

As we’ve seen, the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin allows you to use a single plugin to integrate your WooCommerce site with Facebook, Instagram, and WooCommerce. A presence on all three social networks will help you maximize your visibility, so you should target all three. Luckily, both Facebook and Instagram belong to the same company, so you just need to create one product catalog for both, whereas you need to create a brand new one for TikTok.

Hopefully, this tutorial shows you just enough to get started and lets you fly forward on your own. Good luck!