- Facebook Games – Most games, served directly through Facebook are based on micro-payment module. That allows developers to sell in-game stuff to the loyal game players. Allowing them to make money directly on Facebook. Additionally, developers can place an ads and make money that way.
- Facebook Applications – Other apps are monetized usually from ads. Developers can insert own ad code inside any developed application on Facebook. Allowing them to make money directly from clicks.
Facebook has a great and well-documented developer database. In the other hand, there are many Facebook developers who knows how to do "the job” if you pay them some money.
Sell Things on the Marketplace
If you want to sell items on a small scale (i.e. you don’t have a “business” per se), then you could always turn to the Facebook Marketplace. The Marketplace allows anyone to set up listings for items they’re trying to sell, not unlike Craigslist or a traditional classifieds section of a newspaper.
As you might expect from Facebook, the Marketplace offers excellent segmentation tools so that people looking for whatever you’re selling will know how to find it.
Go ahead and sell anything on the Marketplace: clothes, old CDs, furniture, cars. You may have a veritable treasure trove of profitable junk on your hands.
Virtual Goods And The Gift Shop
Facebook currently generates a large amount of revenue from the Facebook Gift shop. For those less familiar with the gift shop, it’s a product which enables users to send virtual gifts to one another. At an average cost of $1 per gift, Facebook gifts have become an extremely lucrative business, generating upwards of $100 million last year. Facebook has been slowly opening up the gift shop to third-party developers in order to increase the variety of products sold through the shop.
In August of last year, Facebook began opening the gift shop to non-profits and by September it was opened to a number of other developers. During the ongoing Haiti crisis, Causes has been offering users the opportunity to purchase gifts which directly benefit victims of the tragedy. While there are few public estimates of Facebook’s gift shop revenue, we’d expect Facebook to generate upwards of $150 million from their gift shop this year.
Sell on Facebook Marketplace
Facebook’s often overlooked Marketplace, which functions like a socially connected version of eBay, can also be connected to your business page. If you want to open a small online store, this can be a good option – especially if you want to take advantage of the viral marketing that social networking sites can provide. Users can search Marketplace for all sorts of products, but priority is given first to the users’ friends and mutual friends, who are more trusted than anonymous sellers and buyers. Results are also arranged geographically, giving it far more coverage than eBay or Amazon. In addition, Facebook’s convenient messaging system is far faster than conventional online retailers, and small businesses can use PayPal instead of more expensive credit and debit card processors.
Recommended Tools
If you want to make money online, you need to get efficient with your time management. The following tools will help you spend less time posting updates and more time on revenue generating tasks.
- Buffer. Allows you to create a custom schedule for posting updates to your Facebook profile or page. Add posts to your Buffer and they will automatically be assigned to the next open time slot.
- Post Planner. Allows you to schedule posts to your pages and groups. Also gives you ideas of what to write when you don’t know what to post.
- HootSuite. Allows you to schedule posts to your profile and page. Also allows you to monitor your newsfeed in one dashboard.
- Another thing you could use is an analytics tool that brings your Facebook Insights together with your other data. Here are some good ones to try.
- SumAll. Lets you view your Facebook Insights alongside business data from a variety of sources in a graph so you can see how a spike in Facebook activity affects your business.
- Cyfe. Prefer dashboards? Cyfe lets you create dashboards with business data from a variety of sources.
- Social Report. If you’d rather get your Facebook Insights and activity delivered to your inbox.
- Rival IQ. For those who need to constantly monitor their competitors, Rival IQ lets you see your competitor’s Facebook page description and activity levels. It will also notify you when any significant changes are made to the page.
Sell Products on Facebook’s Marketplace
When looking for an online marketplace to sell stuff, people immediately think of eBay and Craigslist, but you can also sell a variety of items, from books and baby products to clothing and even furniture, on Facebook’s Marketplace.
It’s like a virtual garage sale so try it out today.
Conclusion
Facebook makes money a number of ways however advertising is the company’s revenue channel. With self-serve ads becoming a booming business for Facebook and with the growth of Engagement Ads, Facebook could be on track to generate up to $1 billion in revenue this year. While our estimate is aggressive, Facebook has been experiencing continued growth and through further education about the company’s advertising products, we’d expect Facebook to stay on track to almost double previously quoted estimates of last year’s revenue: $550 million.
While many users still wrongly think that Facebook will charge users because they aren’t able to pay for the site, the reality is that advertising is proving to be a very big business for Facebook.