Moontoast, one of the leading social commerce platforms working with retailers, publishers, musicians and celebrities has just published a new, useful and insightful e-book on Facebook commerce for brands.

It’s most definitely worth a download – from here (free) – as it contains some of the smartest advice we’ve found on f-commerce to date.  We think the smartest way for brands to understand Facebook and Facebook Commerce is as fan-media and fan-sales; Moontoast’s e-book provides invaluable insight for doing precisely that – and for creating an army of ‘super fans‘ (brilliant concept) who buy and advocate more and more often.

For the time-squeezed, here’s a quick speed summary of our top takeouts of Moontoast’s The Fan Brand’s Guide to Facebook Commerce – including a natty infographic on the Anatomy of a Fan

• F-commerce allows you to find and serve your most valuable customers – your fans – and is useful as a platform for managing fan-rewards
• Success in Facebook commerce requires integrating commerce with a solid social media strategy – just opening up shop won’t work
• The first step in any Facebook commerce strategy should be to listen to your fans – what do your fans want from you, what could you do for them?
• Success in Facebook commerce is like any other business – solving people’s problems at a profit – what problems do your fans have, that you could solve with f-commerce?
• Four key drivers determine social commerce success – keep it simple and focus on these key drivers
• Audience (Size and Quality)
• Offer (Excitement and Experience)
• Placement (Find-ability, Relevance)
• Virality (Share-ability, Talk-ability)
• Facebook commerce has its own conversion funnel and certain tactics can be used drive people through the Facebook commerce conversion funnel
• Liking with Limited – use scarcity, limited availability, limited editions, limited time to drive likes, shares and purchases
• Quality over Quantity – don’t collect random likes but build a loyal community of genuine fans using authenticity, consistency, and great content
• Getting Direct – your fans trust you and want to buy from you, so make Facebook a privileged VIP fan-sales channel
• Friends get Benefits – use f-commerce to reward your fans for being loyal to your brand; get creative – beyond special fan-pricing with fan-first/fan-exclsuives
• Be Regular – yep, “eighty percent of success is showing up.” (Woody Allen) – make fan-management a priority, and keep your fans engaged
• Facebook fans can be segmented into different groups along a “Facebook Fan Engagement Spectrum” from “potential fans” up to “super fans”
• Super Fans
• Purchasing Fans
• Advocate Fans
• Engaged Fans
• Potential Fans
• Turning “potential fans” into “super fans” involves not only quality news and interaction, but using the set of engagement tools in Facebook
• Surveys
• Photos
• Videos
• Comments
• Downloads
• Commerce
• The health of your fan-base can be measured in terms of
• Reach – monthly active users, total fans, total fan network size
• Interaction -  share-like-comment count, plays, page loads
• Sales – conversion rate (from impression, in cart), cart size, purchase frequency, sales/fan
• Referrals – referred members by fan, referred buyers by fan
• The health of your content (whether you appear in your fans news feeds depends on Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm and is influenced by three variables (see image)
• Affinity (home much interaction you have with fans)
• Weight (how much other fans interact with a post)
• Time (how new the post is)
• Success with Facebook commerce means realising you are in the content business – you need to create content that is
• Fun
• Engaging
• Authentic
• Responsive
• Regular
• Rich (Video/Photo)
• Consistent