Source: Well Kept Wallet
Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. Whether you own a full-fledged business or you only have one item to sell, anybody can make money with Facebook.
If you’re only using Facebook to message friends and take quizzes, consider some of these suggestions boost your income or start a side hustle.
Who Can Make Money With Facebook?
Anybody can make money with Facebook! Like anything in life, you need to be persistent and not give up if your campaign doesn’t work the first time.
For most of these suggestions, the quality of your Facebook profile is going to be your best way of making a first impression. There are lots of spammers on Facebook that promise the world and never follow through. You don’t want to be one of these people as your chances of making money will be slim.
Make sure your Facebook profile makes it look like you’re a real person. Put a picture of yourself or your business emblem in your profile picture or cover photo section.
Also, make sure you list the correct city you live in so people don’t think you accidentally post in the wrong group. Finally, include contact information and a website link if you own a local or online business.
Depending on how you are planning to make money with Facebook, you should also consider creating a separate account. This way, you can keep your personal and business activity separate. If you want to keep everything under one account, that’s okay too if you want you’re an individual seller trying a Craigslist alternative.
What Can You Sell on Facebook?
Almost anything can be sold on Facebook. Most people use Facebook to sell their used cars, secondhand items, handmade items, ebooks, and to advertise their weekend garage sale.
A few things you can’t sell on Facebook include:
- Alcohol
- Illicit drugs
- Tobacco
- Firearms
- Animals
- Real money gambling products
- Certain healthcare products
In general, you can sell anything on Facebook that you can buy at a local store without having to show a photo id or a doctor’s prescription.
How to Make Money With Facebook
Once your profile is ready to go, you’re now ready to start making money. In many cases, you’re going to be selling items or services you already own. But, we’ll also include a few other suggestions too.
There are 13 Ways You Can Make Money With Facebook:
1. Write a Facebook Post
If you just want to sell to your current Facebook friends, you can write a post. In the “What’s on your mind?” field, start typing what you want to sell. You can also include a picture of the item too. Posts only share with your friends, but they can be seen by others you don’t know if your friend shares the post.
Maybe you’ve see your own friend circles selling cars, real estate, and other possessions instead of going through the hassle of selling to a stranger. If you’ve never sold anything on Facebook you can use their posts as an example to model your post.
Follow Up On Facebook Messenger
Once a friend or group member expresses interest, continue the conversation on Facebook Messenger. This private chat messaging service lets you stay in touch with previous customers and potential customers that didn’t make a sale the first time. If you’re constantly flipping used items, you can keep these people in mind and send them a message when you finally find an item they wanted originally.
2. Join Local Buy and Sell Groups
If you’re trying to sell locally, there’s a good chance you probably won’t sell to a friend. That’s why you also need to join your local buy and sell groups. Facebook makes it super easy to sell because you can usually create the post in one group and you have the option to choose other groups before the post goes live.
As an example, let’s say you want to sell your car. Your local city or county most likely has at least two different buy and sell groups that accept used car listings. Even though you only make one post, it shows up in multiple groups and you get to reach more Facebook members.
Some of the most popular groups are garage sales and automobiles. To quickly find the groups in your area, click the “Buy and Sell Groups” in the Explore menu. You can also search for group names to filter through the different options too.
Every group has different selling policies so make sure you read the group guidelines before you post. Otherwise, the group moderators can delete your post or remove you from the group.
Create Your Own Group
If there isn’t a local group for the items you want to sell, you might consider starting your own group.
3. Sell on Facebook Marketplace
Don’t forget to sell on the Facebook Marketplace too. The Marketplace is a free-for-all feature where you can buy, sell, or trade almost anything in your local area. Although it’s not as specialized as local buy and sell groups, everybody has access to the Facebook Marketplace so they can easily share your post with their friends and maybe even find that special something they’ve been looking for.
4. Earn Refer-a-Friend Bonuses
Do you use an online service that you just love and want to share with others? Word of mouth recommendations are one of the most efficient forms of advertising. Companies know this and that’s why they offer refer-a-friend bonus when your friends join by social media.
One company that offers social media refer-a-friend bonuses is Rakuten. Maybe you already use them to earn cash back on nearly every online purchase yourself! You can send email invites or click the social media share buttons in your account to share your referral link. If your friend signs up through your referral link, you can earn a cash bonus!
More companies that you use on a regular basis offer referral bonuses than you might realize. Take a minute or two and see if you can earn some extra cash by sharing your favorite apps and websites on social media.
5. Enter Contests
Some companies and blogs run contests and you can earn entries by sharing your link on Facebook or following their Facebook page. You can also join contest and giveaways groups to find the newest opportunities as well.
Many of these contests are free, so the only entry requirement is your time. Every giveaway is different but you might have the chance to win Amazon gift cards, kitchen gadgets, or a new backyard grill set.
6. Create Facebook Ads
For this suggestion, you will first need to create a Facebook Page for your business or website. In fact, think of Pages as “Facebook for Business.” Creating a Page is free and only takes a few minutes and any business or website is eligible. If you need a visual example, visit the Well Kept Wallet Facebook page to get an idea of what your Page can look like.
Once your page is created, you can share posts with your Page followers just like you can write posts on your personal timeline. Facebook Pages are the social media equivalent of having a mailing list; you can regularly send messages to your most loyal followers. For example, ice cream parlors might publish a weekly post mentioning the flavor of the week.
However, don’t forget that you can make money posting ads on Facebook to reach people that currently don’t follow your Page.
Tips to Create Facebook Ads
While Page posts can help you make money, you also need to use paid Facebook ads to reach a new audience. You can create your own ads or use a service like Flourish With Facebook Ads to create professional ads that can attract more clicks the first time.
As you create posts on your Page, you will have the option to click the blue “Boost Post” button. After clicking the button, you will be taken to the ad creator tool. Although there are more features than what’s mentioned below, there are three tools you must pay close attention to:
- Objective (Do you want to interact with your audience or make sales?)
- Audience (Target a specific audience or not?)
- Budget (How much are you willing to spend and how many days do you want the campaign to last?)
A huge benefit of Facebook ads is that you can target a specific audience based on where they live, age, gender, and interests. Or, you can also advertise to your followers and their friends if you choose as well. You can also monitor the people reached and the number of engagements. After the campaign finishes, you can compare the number of engagements to the total campaign cost to calculate your cost-per-click (CPC) amount.
If you’ve ever advertised elsewhere for business, you know that advertising can be expensive in a hurry. Advertising on Facebook is relatively inexpensive for paid ads since you can choose your target audience for only a few dollars compared to hundreds or thousands of dollars per campaign.
Running Facebook ads is a learning process based on trial-and-error. Because of the low-cost requirements, don’t be afraid to try several small campaigns that only cost $10 to $15 each with different target audiences to find what works best for you.
7. Invest in Facebook
This is another suggestion that anybody can use to make money with Facebook. And, you don’t even have to create a Facebook account! While you might find this ironic, Facebook is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Index.
Facebook’s stock ticker symbol is FB and it can be purchased with any brokerage in your IRA or taxable brokerage account. You might consider buying Facebook stock with Stockpile for these three reasons:
- Each trade is only 99 cents vs. the industry average of $4.95
- You can buy partial shares of any individual stock or ETF
- New accounts get a $5 gift of any stock
Because a single Facebook share trades for approximately $187 (as of this writing), you won’t be able to buy a single share through a traditional brokerage like Vanguard or Fidelity if you can only invest $100 today. With Stockpile, you can buy fractional (partial) shares of stock so you can at least buy part of a share. In this example, a $100 investment will let you own 53% of one share. Hey, everybody has to start somewhere!
As with any stock market investment, Facebook is guaranteed to make you money. Its stock price can fluctuate daily so you should invest and plan to hold long-term to realize a profit. If you prefer a less volatile way to invest in Facebook, you might consider buying an index fund that currently holds Facebook in its portfolio.
8. Host a Fundraiser
While you won’t personally profit from this suggestion, you can still help raise money for a personal cause or non-profit. Crowdfunding has become a popular way to help others with financial needs that pay their bills without some outside help.
You can create a fundraising page for one of the causes below:
- Personal emergency
- Crisis relief
- Health and medical
- Education
- International
- Faith
- Sports
There are plenty of nobles causes that Facebook community members are willing to support. The only problem is that they don’t know where to look. Thankfully, this feature helps address that issue.
9. Apply For a Job
Facebook also has their very own job board to help you find a new job. Local companies will advertise open positions in the “Jobs” tab. You will find full-time and part-time positions for many industries in this page so scroll down and look at all the opportunities.
In addition to the Facebook Jobs button, there are many groups that list online job leads too. You can join different groups to find job leads and also get insights on the application process and work experience from other group members.
10. Become a Social Media Manager
If you’re social media savvy, you can also get paid to manage corporate social media accounts. As a social media virtual assistant, your responsibilities might include:
- Scheduling social media posts
- Responding to comments and interacting with followers
- Creating social media graphics
- Monitoring ad campaign metrics
- Building the audience size
There’s a good chance that you’ll have to manage social media account on other platforms besides Facebook. So, it can be a good idea to at least be familiar with the larger platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter as well.
If you’re Facebook savvy, this can be a perfect opportunity to work from home and make a part-time income with flexible hours.
11. Join Facebook Groups and Help Others
Another way to potentially make money with Facebook is to join groups and help answer people’s questions. This will be a viable option for bloggers and business owners.
All you have to do is find groups that match your area of expertise. In a way, you can say these groups replaced the role of online forums that were popular in the pre-Facebook internet era.
If you’re a smart investor, you can join several investing groups and help people with their various investing questions. For instance, you can compare free investing apps or whether to rollover a 401k.
Even if investing isn’t your specialty, you can find a group that’s for you. As you help people, you can build a reputation and can even include links to your website to help out the reader. Each page visit means more website traffic that can potentially increase your search engine rankings and maybe even earn an affiliate commission.
Just like the Facebook Buy and Sell groups, you need to pay attention to the group’s posting guidelines. Unless you’re a moderator, you might not be able to post affiliate links or self-promoting articles. Many groups have these policies to keep spam to a minimum so the reader is getting sound and impartial advice.
12. Create Facebook Live Videos
If you’re not camera shy, Facebook Live can be another fun way to build a personal brand. Maybe you create videos that show how you’re working from home or using a product in real-time. Or, you can host a live question and answer session where the live viewers message their questions and you answer them live.
As internet bandwidth speeds continually increase, live streams are constantly becoming more common and YouTube isn’t the only video platform in town.
13. Look for Critical Security Flaws
Facebook and other large websites are always looking to close security flaws that can let a hacker hack into the website. If you enjoy testing websites, the Facebook Bug Bounty program lets you report coding flaws that need to be patched. You can get paid for your diligence if the flaw hasn’t been reported to Facebook yet.
Even if do find a reported bug, please report it anyway. It will improve the user experience for the rest of us!
Summary
Anybody can make money with Facebook. It doesn’t matter if you want to sell locally or you want to promote an online website. By joining groups, interacting with other Facebook members, and maybe even running a paid ad or two, you can make a recurring income on Facebook if you desire.
Even if you only want to list a garage sale or sell your old car and make money once, Facebook is a free and efficient way to tell others what you have for sale.
Have you ever made money with Facebook before? If so, please share your story below.
