How to use Facebook on PrestaShop

As we all know, the social network Facebook has become, over the years, almost unavoidable for the marketing of many merchants.

This network offers many solutions to merchants wishing to communicate on its platform, but often paid, these solutions do not present any guarantee and requires a lot of financial and personal investment to become profitable.

Beyond the paid solutions, there are free elements to put in place on all sites to hope to improve its positioning and bring more visitors on its store.

The share buttons

PrestaShop offers a basic solution for sharing product sheets on social networks using buttons on each product sheet.

Easy solution for the majority of merchants who leave these buttons in place, forgetting that they are present on their site and that they slow down the display of their product page for a questionable result.

There are proponents and anti-share buttons, personally, I'm in the second category and I still can't understand why some sites keep these buttons when nobody ever clicks on them (I'm waiting for the person who's going to prove to me by A + B that less than ten years ago he met a guy, whose name he doesn't remember, and that he saw him click on a share button and in fact, my position is null).

It is therefore preferable to do without this kind of system that advertises more to the social networks presented than to your store

The Page Insert

Here, another system implemented by PrestaShop, which allows you to display in the form of a rectangular insert, the activity of your Facebook Page.

you have to offer something interesting
to interest people

Many merchants hope, by setting up or keeping these inserts, that they will get thousands of subscribers, except they forget one fundamental thing, you have to offer something interesting to interest people.

Except that these inserts go completely unnoticed in the design of the site and cause significant slowdowns in the display of the site, while offering more communication to Facebook than to the store itself.

It is obvious that this kind of insert will be more harmful than beneficial, so uninstall it and you will see only positive for your site and nothing negative for your Facebook Page.

Open Graph

Open Graph is a system of encoding the metadata of a web page to communicate the data you want to Facebook.

When one of your urls is shared on the social network for the first time, Facebook will read this meta data to create the visual insert on the thread of the friends of the person who shares your site. All this data must be filled in to avoid Facebook transmitting information in the wrong form or on elements you don't want.

Often we find this type of code in PrestaShop templates, but they are rarely complete and do not include customization.

We all know that the most important thing is the image that people will discover on Facebook, I have developed a new module with more customization options.

Conclusion

PrestaShop allows you to have a positive interaction with Facebook and it would be a shame not to optimize this relationship by implementing solutions that don't require a lot of resources and that save you time like with my module to integrate Open Graph data properly.