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How To Optimize A Business Page For The Facebook Of Tomorrow

How To Optimize A Business Page For The Facebook Of Tomorrow image facebook for business 300x120
How To Optimize A Business Page For The Facebook Of Tomorrow image facebook for business 300x120

By now every business knows they need a Facebook page; with over a billion users it’s a no-brainer. The question on every business owner and marketer’s tongue is how to stand out among that massive sea of people and the other businesses competing for their attention. Here are some tips for optimizing your Facebook page so it can become an effective component of a business’s online strategy.

Give The People What They Want

When it comes to social media it’s helpful to remember that it’s not enough to just sell on a Facebook page. People don’t go on social media to be pitched by business. They seek entertainment and the chance to connect with people who share their interests. The most successful Facebook pages will provide both of these things.

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People need a reason to like a page and keep coming back to its content. Entertainment is that reason. At this point the goal isn’t to sell, it’s to familiarize them with the brand and build a good reputation so that when a need does arise, they will think of that business first.

Post Frequently

Ancillary to entertaining people is posting often. What’s the point of liking something that only posts twice a month? That’s the opposite of entertainment. Ideally a Facebook page should be updated at least once a day. Just don’t go overboard; no one wants a dozen updates a day on their news feed from a business page.

Coming up with that much content can be difficult, but really anything will do. Pictures, links, news, memes, quotes, questions, videos, and coupons are all great sources of content. Whenever someone in the office comes across an interesting piece of content they should throw it up on the Facebook page for the entire business community to enjoy.

Optimize the page for Facebook’s Foray into Search

One of the major developments coming to search over the next year is Facebook’s new Graph Search, which will allow you to search for people, photos, restaurants, music, businesses and more right on Facebook. Just as a normal website absolutely must be optimized for Google web search so too must Facebook pages be optimized for Graph Search.

The first step is choosing a vanity URL. When a page is first created, it comes with an automatically generated URL that includes a bunch of ugly numbers. Thankfully Facebook offers the option to create a vanity URL including the company name at https://www.facebook.com/username.

Changing the URL makes the page more professional and does more to promote the brand. Plus it will help that page rank well in both Google and Graph searches.

Next the About section of the page must be fully filled out with useful and keyword optimized information about the business. Not only will this information be readily available to interested users without forcing them to leave Facebook, but it will help the page show up in Facebook search.

Facebook is going to rank results in Graph Search partly by how many people like that page, as well as by how much that fanbase grows. So getting people to like and interact with a page – by entertaining them! – is an essential part of optimizing for search.

You can find some other quick tips for optimizing a Facebook page here.

Location, Location, Location

Facebook is also making moves in local search with updates to its Nearby feature allowing users to search on their mobile phones for local businesses. In order to show up, a business’s page needs to be outfitted with information useful to someone on the go: address, hours, phone number, etc.

As with Graph Search, success requires real live human beings to like that page. Nearby ranks businesses largely based on likes, check-ins, and recommendations. Once again we come back to the necessity of winning fans and keeping them happy. This, more than anything, is the key to success on the world’s most popular social media platform and soon-to-be search engine.

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