Category: Facebook

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The Changing Landscape of Social Media

Are Twitter heads reading your Twitter feed?
Are Twitter heads reading your Twitter feed?

With recent changes Facebook has made, renegotiation of the Google-Twitter contract, and Google’s announcement that it does not include social signals in its ranking algorithm, business owners and SEO’s are struggling to find where social media fits into a strategy for web visibility.

Although I still feel that social media still has a place in a mature business’ overall marketing plan, how to go about using social media for visibility is now drastically changing.

It used to be that having social updates posted to Twitter and Facebook was a strategy that all businesses on the web needed to embrace, now our recommendations are different based on this changed landscape.

For new businesses the validity of starting a Facebook or Twitter account with no followers and paying a writer to post updates has lost value. It is by far better for this new business to invest in AdWords and blogging for a long range content and visibility plan than to be on social media platforms.

For established mature businesses whether to post to Facebook or Twitter really now depend on the business’ community. Some firms have a vital Facebook presence and to continue to post there makes perfect sense. Additionally for these businesses to use Facebook’s options to promote posts to a wider demographic is now becoming an attractive option. For right now Twitter continues to be a smart place to be, but this may change rapidly as Google and Twitter redefine their relationship in the months ahead.

What is becoming more and more attractive than a Twitter and Facebook as a marketing strategy is activity on a personal Google+ profile tied to a rel=”author” tag with high quality content pieces and Google+ Community creation and moderation.

This next year will be strategic for how businesses use social media. I am predicting that more activity will be in Facebook  promoted updates than in regular content creation and that Twitter will need to continue to reinvent itself to stay relative in this new landscape.

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Google States They Do Not Use Facebook or Twitter for Ranking

Matt Cutts, the lead Spam Engineer at Google revealed just this last week that Google is not using Facebook or Twitter posts or profiles for index ranking. This is very big news and a change in what Google has stated about how social impacts their algorithm.

You can watch the full YouTube video here.

Here’s the bottom-line about using social media and Google rankings:

1. Google is not ranking your site based on the activity you have on social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter.

2. Google does look at links that are shared on these social sites just like they look at content pages when they can spider the content.

3. Google is concerned about using social profiles to create “identity” as this may change or be blocked over time.

4. Google is not recording, for their algorithm, the number of likes or followers a social profile has.

5. Matt Cutts states that he personally likes social profiles for sharing and driving traffic, but does not recommend using them as an avenue to impact Google search placement.

This is an interesting change for Google as previously Google has stated that it did include likes and follower numbers as part of social signals and that these social signals impacted organic placement.

My recommendation is to continue to use Twitter and Facebook if it makes sense to do so. Some businesses have a rich forum on Facebook and should not abandon their followers just because they now don’t get SEO juice from activity there. But for SEO’s to encourage social media interaction now appears to be just one more SEO tactic that Google is clearly disavowing as a way to get organic placement.

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Interesting Nuggets on Social Media You May Not Have Known

You’ll want to read this full article as it has some excellent tidbits many of which I didn’t even know about. It is titled “Lesser Known Secrets for Better Social Media Results” at the Search Engine Journal.

Here are a few of the secrets that I liked best from the article and some of my own.

1. Start a tweet with .@somename and the update will appear publicly in all your streams and your friend’s you are talking to not just in the feed of your followers and in the feed of the other person’s followers as well. Who knew! .@ you will be my next update.

2. Try to use only one or two hashtags in a tweet. Too many starts to look like spam. We tell our writers try to stick with one.

3. On Facebook have your images for your wall be at least 403 pixels wide by 403 pixels tall. If you are using your smartphone, check your image size settings so you aren’t sending a small photo. Not only will they look better, but when you feature the photo on your page it will not be blurry.

4. Did you know that Pinterst allows the use of hashtags in the description box? Use them wisely and to your benefit.

5. Spend your time in Google+ Communities. Your updates there will be posted to your personal profile and you’ll have more interaction and fun. Personally I have really built up my circle numbers by creating a community and moderating it.

6. In Google+ don’t use the @personname use +personname. Although Google may understand the @ you’ll see that others are using the +.

Make sure to read the article as there may be more great tips you can glean for your own use.

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Getting Your Listing in Facebook’s Graph Search

You've got to be popular to be shown on Facebook's Graph Search.
You’ve got to be popular to be shown on Facebook’s Graph Search.

You may love it or hate it, but Facebook’s Graph Search is here to stay and just another way that Bing and Facebook are drawing closer together and another way your data is being used to sell products.So, who gets shown in Graph Search results and how do you get there?

The bottom-line is you get there with popularity and good placement on Bing. Here are a few of the things that help your site to appear in Graph Search.

  1. Number of check-ins to your location using Facebook.
  2. Number of shares and likes.
  3. Size of your fan base. This may also include number of subscribers and not just likes.
  4. Relevancy of your location to the searcher. Closer will be better.
  5. Relevancy and interaction from the searcher’s friends.

So in other words your listing and information will show when you have worked your Facebook plan to grow your activity, encouraged share-ability, become meaningful to your fans and subscribers, and have grown your fan base.

If Facebook does not have enough information about a search it will then show Bing.com search results.