Facebook – Page 6 – The Web Authority

March 6, 2014March 2, 2014

Should You Still Post on Facebook?

Glass of Chocolate Milk with Two Straws — Make Sure You Share Long Enough on Facebook!

So many businesses are wrestling with what makes sense to them in regards to social media and specifically Facebook.1. Some have decided that it is too much trouble and that their likes and follower numbers are too hard to grow and so have abandonned Facebook entirely.

2. Some have decided that Facebook is the place they want to be and have dropped Twitter, LinkedIn, and in some cases even blogging to invest more time on Facebook.

So how can you decide if you should still post on Facebook for your business?

1. Before you drop Facebook, make a careful analysis of where you are connecting with your customers and prospects. If you are posting regularly on Facebook and you have under 80 followers after posting for 6 months to a year, you may be able to easily move out of Facebook and invest your time elsewhere. A great place to move is to a Google+ Community, starting as a member of an existing community before you spin off into one of your own making.

2. If you have 80 or more followers and you are having regular monthly follower growth, I would consider staying with Facebook and making an effort to improve your activity there both with a minimum of two updates a day and some level of follower/fan interaction such as likes, responses to posts and private messages.

3. If you just have a Facebook page and have never done regular updates I would try first for 6 months before you totally abandon Facebook.

Here’s what I’ve seen personally, with regular quality updates for over a year we took an account that had very few likes and activity into one that is growing over 20 new likes a month. As more time goes by, the follower/like numbers have started to increase from 20 to over 30 a month and are still climbing. For this client, out of all the social media platforms that they are using, Facebook is the most active, even more popular than YouTube. But, it took a while to really identify that Facebook was the place for them to be. The important take away from this is that it is important to evaluate long enough to be able to clearly discern which social media platform is best for your own business.

February 18, 2014February 16, 2014

The Changing Landscape of Social Media

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.

January 30, 2014January 25, 2014

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.