Social media may seem trivial to some people who don’t understand its power and potential. To marketers, the network channels we share in can mean the difference between uber-success and mediocrity for ourselves and our clients. Learning how to use SEO in social media combines two powerful tactics that can reap huge benefits for businesses. Here are 3 simple but effective tips for utilizing your networking sites. Get excited!
1. Pay Attention to Time, Frequency, and Location
Like we’ve been told since we were kids, it’s important to share. At any given time only about 6% of your followers are online. Postingthe same informationon different sites at different times makes sure a wider audience is seeing your posts. If you are on the east coast and a large amount of your followers are on the west coast, posting something at 6 am will most likely be missed by most of your west coast viewers. You can post a link on Facebook in the morning, on Twitter in the afternoon, and on Google + at night. That way you are reaching a larger range of viewers and creating a bigger impact with the same bit of information. Remember, don’t just share your links; let your followers shine by sharing their stuff too. They may very well return the favor.
2. Use Keywords
SEO focuses a lot on the specific words that people search for. In order to find those keywords, you can search Google Adwords or you can also search public posts in the search area of Facebook. These searches give you an idea of what people are talking about on Facebook that’s relevant to you and what you want to promote. Then you can use those key words in your account profiles and updates, which will make you show up higher in the search results.
3. Utilize These 3 SEO Hot Spots on Facebook
By focusing on three specific areas, you can use simple SEO tips to drive traffic to your Facebook fan page. The vanity URL, About Section and status updates can be filled with keywords that drive your fanpage higher up in the search results.
- By creating a unique URL, you can easily show your specialty and create a memorable link to your Facebook fan page. Instead of having a generic URL like www.facebook.com/myfanpage94758, Facebook gives you the one time option to create a vanity URL (but that’s only after 100 likes on your fan page). With this handy option, you can change your URL to something that represents you, what you do and what you are passionate about like www.facebook.com/SocialMediaAddict. This gives searchers so much more information than an unspecified URL. The more findable you are, the better. And yes, findable is a word.
- Keywords, Keywords, Keywords! Just like on a website, utilizingthe About Section of your Facebook fan page to place relevant words will drive traffic straight to your fanpage. Make sure to frontload keywords (add the most important information in the top of that section) because that is the part visible on the main search page of Facebook. Think of your About Section like a press release. Put the “who, what, where, when, why and how” in the first few sentences sprinkled with specific keywords.
- The third hot spot for traffic building is your status updates, which few people realize are indexed by the first 18 characters. It’s all about those keywords and here’s an interesting tip for sharing links: Once you paste a link into a Facebook status but before you hit send, you can hover over the title and it will turn yellow. Click on it and you can change the title of the link to fit whatever key words you want to emphasize. How easy is that?
So, what’s this all mean?
Do a little research to find those keywords that will work best for you and what you want to promote and then use them. It’s as simple as that. But just like your site’s SEO, don’t go crazy with keywordstuffing.It’s all about using the languages your customers are using.
Chime in, por favor: what are your favorite social media optimization tips?
Photo credit: Gavin Llewellyn on Flickr.com
Jenny Munn
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1 Comment
My number one tip: listen and respond. For most of us that’s easy enough, but somehow businesses fail to:
— A friend of mine is very active on social media and works for an agency, but the agency doesn’t listen. I sent them a tweet witha quick question two weeks ago and I’m still waiting for a reply…
— I’ve done some studies with car dealers and churches, and consistenly 90% of the time they fail to reply to simple questions.
— I was looking for a new CRM package for our company a few weeks ago and was digging through many options. One looked good, but the last update on their Facebook page was three ago, from an unhappy customer, with no reply in sight.
It’s not hard to do, but you need to make it part of your routine.