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Facebook offers numerous tools to create business opportunities.

“How”, you ask?

It’s past time to begin thinking of your company’s Facebook page as something of a “secondary business site”. It really has become that influential. Facebook has a lot of features that can help you connect to people through your friends. Using the messaging system, the events calendar, and the news feeds you can expose your brand to a significant swath of of Facebooks 500 million users.

Here are 4 marketing strategies every Facebook page owner should know.

1. Take some time to choose a good name for your page. Once you decide commit to it. Changing your facebook name is not unlike changing your business phone number. It makes it harder on your friends to refer people to your page.

A good name will stick with people and make it more likely that they’ll pass it on to their friends. Don’t stuff the name with generic keywords. That doesn’t work – it makes your page’s name too long and it looks like spam to your fans, which means they will likely hide it in their news feed.

A good name should be specific. Facebook strives to authentically represent the pages of businesses, brands, and celebrities. They can be mean. If they think your page is a liability they’ll disable your ability to update your page making it a lot of work to contact your fans and killing any marketing benefit you were hoping to get from your page.

Don’t get greedy.

Use your company name in the page title and keep it authentic.

2. Take the time to fill out the info tab.

At this point I need to address a common misconception about Facebook. You won’t ever get a significant SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, benefit from your Facebook profile. Facebook obfuscates external links so Google won’t pass page rank to them or, in some cases, can’t see them at all. Facebook works very hard to keep link spammers off their site, and this is a very effective way to do that. Besides, what really makes Facebook stand out as a marketing tool is the fact that it’s so popular you can use it to network. Rather than worrying about the search engines, make your focus using the site to attract new customers and keep existing customers engaged and excited about your product.

There are a few things, however, you can do to use Facebook to improve your search engine presence. Facebook has a lot of “domain authority”, and anyone who’s ever gotten listed in Wikipedia will tell you that links from a high domain authority site gets a search engine benefit, even if you don’t get any page rank.

It won’t hurt to include keywords and links on the info page. Make sure to include:

• Links to your own sites or other relevant resources
• City, state, and address, which are important fields for local searches
• Company overview, mission, and products, which become relevant when folks do product searches

Make sure to include your phone number and links to your “buy now” pages. Remember… Optimize your facebook page to the facebook community, not to the search engines. If you do this well over time your facebook profile will bring you customers, and customers are infinitely more valuable than links! Your top priority should be making it easy for your Facebook visitors to contact you, or if they are already ready to commit, buy your product.

3. Post direct links in your page’s stream to your website and other relevant sites. When it comes to getting Google to notice your facebook presence this is the most powerful tool at your disposal. Your status posts are sent out as news updates to your fans and are posted on their pages, too. Google pretty much ignores the links you post on your own profile, but when it sees your news items on lots of other peoples pages it starts to consider them relevant.

There are two kinds of status links. It’s important that you use the right kind of link to get a benefit.

URL: Just enter a URL into your status and Facebook will autolink it to the site. While the anchor text of the link will always just be the URL when using this method, it does go directly to the destination page and not through a Facebook URL. Wherever possible use an actual URL.
Attach Link: Attach links seem really cool because they automatically pull down all kinds of cool information from the page you’re linking to, including a thumbnail image. This method gives you the option of changing the anchor text of the link. The only problem is that the link does not go straight to the destination URL, but rather through a Facebook URL. This makes it hard for Google to figure out where the link is actually going.

4. Get fans to comment and like content in your stream to strengthen intra-Facebook linking.

Facebook links a fan’s name back to their Facebook profile page when they comment or like content in your Facebook page’s stream ebaconline.com.br - curso artista 3d online. When these comments and likes are indexed, Google will see more links between your page and your page’s fans and will view this as a stronger bond.

Facebook can become a valuable ally to both your site and your business. With a Facebook profile your firm becomes visible to an immense user base. Yes… building your Facebook page requires a little creative planning and decent implementation it will make it easier for prospects to find you online.

About The Author

Brian O’Connell is the owner and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s largest website design businesses dedicated entirely to accounting website design. His company presently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and bookkeeping firms.

Filed under: KDE Technology