Hi, my name is Tony van Veen, CEO of Disc Makers. Today, I want to talk about
an exciting opportunity for you as an artist to actually sell physical products — CDs, vinyl,
merch — to a huge audience of fans online. Now, when, as an artist, you're trying to sell product
online, which is really important, especially right now that there's no live concerts happening,
you probably think about Bandcamp. And Bandcamp is probably the number one, an amazing
platform for selling your music and your products directly to fans. However, there are
two other platforms that reach a much, much bigger audience that also have a shop functionality,
except most artists don't seem to know about it. And those are Facebook and Instagram.
And so today what I'd like to do is explain to you how you can set yourself up to sell product — CDs,
vinyl, t-shirts — on Facebook and on Instagram to a large potential audience of fans. And in
order to do that, I'm bringing in Carter Fox who is Social Media Manager for Disc Makers and he's
also a very successful artist in his own right. His recent single was launched in January
and in eight weeks already has over a hundred thousand Spotify streams. And his single 'Eclipse'
that he launched last year has garnered over 1.3 million Spotify streams. So Carter knows a thing
or two about music. He knows a thing or two about marketing. And so, I'm going to let Carter explain
to you step by step how to sell physical product through Facebook and Instagram. Carter, take it
away. Thanks, Tony. So here we are checking out my Facebook Page because you do need a Facebook
Page in order to create a Shop on Facebook. I do have a couple of items uploaded to my Shop already
that I am also selling on my website, which, it's a great benefit to have this available through
Facebook for both advertising and just general availability letting people know it's there.
You never know who'll just kind of stumble on it. Normally, we'd be able to click 'Manage Shop' and
bing bada boom our 'Customize Shop' option is there. If you have not done this yet,
you do need to set up your Commerce Manager, which I'm going to use another page I manage
to show us how to do that. So, like I said, we'll go to our 'Manage Shop'
on our side and it'll even prompt us, you know, 'hey, why should you do this? It really helps.'
So, we'll start up our Shop. It'll give us some info on what we need to get started and,
you know, everything we kind of need and we'll get ready and click next.
So, I'm selling through another website. That's what I've selected. You can also sell
through Facebook or through Messaging depending on what options you have.
Like I said, this is my website where it would actually be, at the end of the day, creating the
transaction from. And today, we're actually gonna show you how to do this uploading that Soulful
Traveler bag. So, like I said, checking out through another website, which is my own website.
And then, since this is the first time being set up, a business account needs to be created and a
contact email needs to be set. It could be the one you already utilized for your personal Facebook
profile, if you had a separate band account or something you weren't utilizing, you can use this.
As well as name your brand new Catalog that you're about to be setting up for your Page.
And consent to the rules of course. And then, we have to submit it to Facebook for review to make
sure everything is qualified for their rules and that we can actually sell on there. And
sometimes, it takes, you know, a couple minutes. Sometimes, it takes a few days to get approved
so, you know, we will see what happens once we click through. And, of course, now that we kind of
have something, we'll be prompted to let everyone else know that we've done it. So, yeah, let's
change it now real quick because let people know it's going to be selling there. Oh, look at that.
That's crazy. We're already approved. So, let's go check out the shop, which
is currently empty. And that's all right because we haven't set anything up but if I go back to my
personal one, my Carter Fox profile, you can see there are a couple already items in there. And
that's where we'd be prompted on our home page to, our Commerce homepage, to add some items. So let's
go forth and do that. We're adding this manually. There are a few options really to go about this.
If you already have a bigger list of merch and items that you were selling, you'd use this bulk
item upload process. If you were using stuff from a website that really transitioned a lot and was
updated pretty constantly, you'd use your pixel ability. But for most indie artists like
ourselves, we're going to add each item manually just so we can control exactly what's going on and
where we're sending it to. So like I said, I kind of pulled these assets already for
my little gym bag that I wanted to have. So I got a nice little picture. I got a nice little title.
And if I jump back to my website, I do even have a really nice description
that I'm going to utilize that will pop up for Shops as well.
And then, as I'm selling it on a website, it will want the link so let me just grab that real quick.
And you'd have to set up a few additional transactional things if you're selling
through Facebook or, you know, sending people to chat. Don't forget to set your price.
And if you had it on sale or doing some kind of special, you can just click that to set it up. And
this is a brand new item. Again, if you're selling something refurbished, let them know. And then of
course, for, you know, advertising purposes and algorithmic purposes, you definitely want to label
it kind of what it most correctly is. And boom. There we go. We got a brand new item in our Shop.
If we had some more stuff to add we totally could. We can see it in our
Items in our Catalog here in our Commerce Manager. A sonic QR code and everything.
You know. That looks great. It'll take, you know, a couple of minutes to load again to our actual
Shop page, but then we can drop down to the Shops. See Instagram. See Facebook. Get a nice preview.
See how they're gonna look. We can rearrange it. We can create some different themes if we wanted.
If you had a bunch of different items and item sets for, you know, certain folks, certain things.
If you had a whole summer set, a whole winter set of stuff, a whole collector's item of CDs and
vinyl, you can create all these kind of item sets here and customize that so people saw that first.
And there you go. That is
getting our Facebook Shop set up. So, you can easily, you know, check around and make sure
you're checking out the Shop and make sure all your items are now there. Like I said, it'll take
a few minutes for that item I just uploaded to get there. But here we are. Awesome. Looks great.
Now, we also need to just double-check and make sure our Instagram profile is correctly set up
and, you know, ready to go. Again, just for the sake of showing everybody, I'm using another
profile I happen to manage to help show how you set this up. So you need to make sure your profile
is a creator or a business profile, which enables you to have shopping, and you can even see right
there it says set up Instagram shopping at the bottom. So, we'll want to click that and you'll
see a very similar prompt to the one on Facebook. Of course, because they're both Facebook.
And we'll want to, you know, set up the Shop. Of course, if you haven't connected, you know,
your business accounts, now, if you're switching a profile on here, you might
have to double-check this kind of stuff. You definitely want to just connect it to the page.
And I'm just connecting it through my personal one this way because of course I'm an admin
across the pages and i'll sign in. Yes, I do. Thank you for asking.
We'll connect the correct account of course because you can see there's a lot
of different accounts so make sure, you know, are on the right one. So, here we go. And make sure
you select a new catalog or, if you already set up the catalog, you can set up the catalog so,
you know, for this account, I'm going to create a new catalog. And if you're also
selling through a partner shop like Shopify or something, that's where you'd connect it there.
But since I'm also selling through the website, I need to enter that information
and we'll submit it for review with Instagram business, just like with Facebook. And again,
this may take a few minutes or it may take up to seven days just depending on, you know,
what you're submitting and the timing of it. And just to show everyone what a finished Shop is,
let's check out the Disc Makers one. And everyone I know is already following it, of course, so
we'll check out what that Shop looks like. It has all of our various items from our catalog
and different examples of things listed right there. And of course, if we click on,
you know, in any of the items and view the product, we get a little more info.
And if we, like, really want to see, we go right to the website because, again, we also even
get people to this site for all of our information as well. And that's how you set up your Shops on
Facebook and Instagram. Thanks, Tony, for having me on here once again. It was great explaining and
good luck. Looking forward to seeing everyone's Shops. All right, Carter, thank you. That was
awesome. And to you, as artists, I hope you found this helpful. I hope you'll make use of
this opportunity. It doesn't cost anything to try. So get your product up there, do a little
bit of marketing, and drive some music income. I hope you found this helpful. See you next time.