Digital Marketing Agency | Barracuda Digital

Facebook and the SEO platform BrightEdge have published a whitepaper about how to help your Facebook page rank better on Search Engines. According to the BrightEdge data, 70% of the Facebook Pages of the top 200 companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t ranked when you search for their brand name on Google.

Boosting the rank of your Facebook page in the SERPs is a good way to outrank those negative results than can damage your brand’s reputation, or retailers that are well ranked for your brand’s name. This can also help you to manage your brand’s online reputation, improve your visibility and increase the engagement of your Facebook users.

The main recommendations in the whitepaper are:

1. Set your vanity URL to exactly match your brand’s name. Try to avoid secondary keywords because you are not going to be well ranked either for your brand’s name or the general keywords. Try to keep it simple, short, and stay focused on your brand’s name.
2. Link to your Facebook page from your website. Link to the vanity URL and use as anchor text the brand’s name: “BarracudaDigital on Facebook”. Put the link on your home page, which is the page on your website with highest PageRank, as well as on inner pages.
3. Use your brand’s name in the post title when you publish something on Facebook. This text is read by crawlers and can help you to rank better.
4. Achieve more “likes”. Those links that are present on users’ open walls and fanpages linked to yours are crawled by search engines and makes your page more relevant for that search term. Also use the social plugins from Facebook on your website as well as the Sponsored Stories format of Facebook Ads.
5. Create sub-pages for specific keywords. If you have sections or categories within your website that you want to promote, try to create different facebook pages and link to them from the different categories on your website. On your main Facebook pages set up the secondary ones as favourite pages in order to link to them and make a ring of your brand’s pages.

Facebook has realised that it’s quite hard for business to keep up to date with the constant innovations and changes that Facebook is publishing all the time. This advice can help anyone to improve the performance of their marketing efforts in the SEO and Social Media fields.

That’s all, try to keep it simple, relevant to your brand’s name, and earn links and likes as much as you can. Take a look at the full report and don’t hesitate to contact us if you need help ranking your Facebook page.

Facebook have launched ‘Insights’, allowing Facebook Page admins to find out how people are interacting with their Facebook Page and website.

The new Insights dashboard provides a single view of all your Facebook analytics related to:•

Websites: including fully-integrated sites, sites that use social plugins, as well as non-integrated domains•

Apps: including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop apps•

Facebook Pages: including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol

Metrics can be viewed by going to the Insights dashboard (http://www.facebook.com/insights).

Here’s some of the new stuff you can find out…

Page Overview Tab

The Page overview tab shows you key metrics about who the people engaging with your Page are, as well as how they interact with it. You can change the date range to monthly or weekly.

Users

In the User section, you can learn more about the people who engage with your Page.

From the users tab you can also get Insights about the people using your Page including more detailed breakdowns of the people using your Page based on their demographics and activity on your Page.

Interactions

The Interactions section of Insights allows you to track how people interact with your stories, by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall. These people help to share your content organically throughout Facebook, as their interactions lead to organic stories being published in their friends’ News Feeds.

The Interactions tab can also give you more details about how people are interacting with your Page, including granular data on the interactions on your page, such as the number of impressions and feedback on specific posts, and the breakdown of the type of interactions, from people writing on your Page wall to people mentioning your Page in their status updates.

That’s it

If you want Barracuda Digital to help you gain more insight into who is looking at your Facebook page, and how they’re interacting with your content, get in touch.

‘We’ve got to have a Facebook page‘ is a phrase that tumbles out of the mouth of marketers in 1,000s of UK businesses every day. With 600m global users Facebook is a huge opportunity to reach out to current customers or find new ones.

But a Facebook page on its own won’t win you any new business – at the end of the day it’s just another web page about your business that happens to be hosted on Facebook.com. A Facebook page needs to be a destination where you interest and stimulate your fans, in the hope that they interact with you and ultimately recommend you on to their social network.

Here’s our top 12 ways to engage your audience on Facebook.

1. Customise your landing page. You need to standout and be memorable on Facebook, and the first way to do that is to create a customised landing page. This should reflect your brand and provide an easy introduction to all of the features of your Facebook page. Take a look at Facebook Platform or install the FBML application to start creating your landing page.

2. Add some Applications spice up your page. Whether its quizzes, contests, games or promotional offers, applications make your Facebook page an interesting place to be.

3. Do you attend any events? Speak at any seminars? Have a stand at tradeshows? Have an office party? Try posting Photos and Videos of these to show the people behind the Facebook page.

4. Start creating Discussion Boards in order to get feedback from your users and generate conversations. Ask questions on your discussion boards that you as a user might ask. Get people from your organisation to contribute to the discussion in their own name, so that users can see there are real people ready to engage with them.

5. Do you frequently create and add new content to your Facebook page or website? Try using the application Publisher to help keep your users completely up to date on your new content.

6. Do you attend events or exhibitions? Match these offline experiences with a Facebook Event, so that you can invite all your Facebook users, get them interested in the offline equivalent, and have them RSVP

7. Use your News Feed for targeted, interesting and engaging updates. These appear in your fan’s timelines allowing you to speak to them directly. These updates might be special offers or discounts, questions relevant to your industry, links to new blog posts, or information about your service.

8. Make sure you add Facebook Share to your main website. This makes it easy for people on your website to spread your content to their friends on Facebook.

9. Add the Like Box feature to your website. This lets users like your Facebook Page and even view its stream directly from your website.

10. Add a Comment Box to your website. This makes it easy for Facebook users to who are on your website to make comments about your content, and even post these comments to their profiles, thus sharing them with their friends on Facebook.

11. An advanced one this: if you can schedule the dev time, take a look at implementing Facebook Connect on your website. This allows users to log-in to your website with their Facebook ID. And more importantly, it becomes easier for them to share what they’re doing on your website with their Facebook friends.

12. Last but not least, if you want Facebook to be a place where you engage with current and future customers, make sure they know about your Facebook page! Promote to your website visitors and customer email databased with a “Find us on Facebook” Badge

That’s it

A Facebook page on its own won’t help you communicate with current customers, or reach out and find new ones. But take these steps to spruce up your Facebook page, and integrate it tightly with your website, in order to engage your audience and help them rec