We know that social signals are definite factors that affect search rankings, giving social media marketing more weight when it comes to SEO management and marketing – so what exactly can we do to optimize social signals?
15 Ways To Optimize Social Signals With FB Pages
For starters, if you already have your social media profiles established, it is probably safe to assume that you’ve wandered into the many different and unique functions each platform has to offer.
If not, you can check out the rest of this blog or simply click on these respective links to see how you can optimize social signals using Google+, Twitter and even through Pinterest.
But for today, we’ll cover probably the most famous social media heavyweight with a population of over one billion users – Facebook, or more specifically Facebook Fan Pages.
1. Create a Facebook Fan Page
Some would argue that this shouldn’t be part of this list but you always need to start somewhere and for this mini-tutorial, you’d definitely need to create your Fan Page to get a better idea on how the rest of the other tips work.
2. Fill up the Fan Page
Your Fan Page wouldn’t work unless you actually had information on it about your or your brand. Make sure you find decent display and cover photos and present yourself or your brand the way it should be presented. It’s practically common sense that accounts that do these tend to have more followers than those who don’t.
3. Link your social media accounts as well as your website to the Fan Page
The general idea is that you want to provide users with easy accessibility to all of your content. As such, list down your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or whichever profiles you want to be found under the “Contact Info” section of your Fan Page.
4. Feed your Fan Page with your blog content or website updates
After you’re done with most of the necessary bits, you should be giving your target audiences something worth reading about. We could apply Brian Clark’s famous “4U Approach” for content writing – Useful, Urgent, Unique and Ultra-specific. Research has also shown more “Likes”, “Shares” and “Comments” on posts with images compared to text or links only.
5. Invite your current blog readers to join/like the Facebook Fan Page
This is where you start building up the actual audience and redirecting traffic to our other desired links. Get as many people to Like your Fan Page to boost your reputation and after 30 likes, you gain access to Facebook Insights, an analytical tool to monitor your Facebook traffic and related user data pertaining to your Fan Page.
6. Add the Facebook Fan Page “Like” button onto your blog
Traffic goes in many directions, not just one-way. If you allow people to “Like” your blog, they automatically “Like” your Facebook Fan Page if you used the same html code. You can go to Facebook Developers to get your “Like Button” code generated.
7. More fan clicks will drive more inbound links
Whenever someone “Likes” your blog, your Fan Page automatically gets “Liked” too if they used the same button code. As your “Likes” increase, your reputation and credibility is simultaneously boosted up, encouraging more people to share your work and create more inbound links to your Fan Page, blog and/or website.
8. Include inbound link in the posts of your Facebook Fan Page
Obviously, if you want users to visit your blog or website from the Fan Page, you would have to provide them with accessible links to proceed there. When possible, try to incorporate a linking structure whereby visitors can hop from your fan page to website and vice versa easily. This not only boosts the traffic statistics because of improved internal linking, but also enhances backlinking SEO.
9. Determine distributive purpose of content by altering article lengths
It is known that shorter length posts get more “Likes”, whereas there will be more shares on longer length post. Depending on whether your want your content to be shared or merely “Liked”, alter your content in the way that benefits your method of driving traffic the best.
10. Posting less is more
Try not to post more than once a day as studies have shown that if content is posted onto Facebook more than once a day, it will tend to have fewer likes, and drops about 20% when more than 3 items are posted up on the same day.
11. Don’t spam
Continuing from number 10, users tend to get annoyed when your brand constantly shows up in their news feed. This mean that you need to properly regulate your activity and schedule each post that doesn’t annoy users, especially if you’re using automatic feeds such as RSS Graffiti.
12. Publish suitable content and choose the best times to post
Once you’ve gotten the hang of your audience and have seen what works and what doesn’t, give them what they want and at the times that you know these audiences would read, share, like and comment.
13. Use the standard yet proven call-to-action
To get likes or shares, say “Click like if…” or “ Click share if…” and keep the second part simple. You may think this doesn’t actually do much or just looks plain annoying, but if you have many fans targeting that particular interest, you can be sure that they will respond positively to that.
14. Duplicating effective results
You can definitely do the same for your comments – ask a question or say, “Tell me in the comments below…” followed by whatever you want to know. Not only do you get more social signals, you get quality feedback and invaluable insight to better manage your brand.
15. Redirecting traffic
If your Fan Page is overwhelmed with social signals and traffic, why not funnel them into your website? To get clicks to your website or blog post, put the URL in the update and say, “Click this link…” and tell them why. When users discover how much more valuable content you have hidden away, they’re sure to be happy to check your Fan Page for updates and “Like”, “Share” and comment on them.
Hopefully by following these tips, you achieve your desired number of “Likes”, “Shares”, and comments on your posts and your Facebook Fan Page. With all that social signals climbing through the roof, it’s only a mere matter of time that more traffic would be simultaneously driven to your corresponding website or blog, and back again to your Fan Page – creating the ultimate social signal optimization chain.
About Daniel Tan
