[Blogger Notes] Facebook Profile vs Page
Back in early 2013, Facebook launched Facebook Graph Search (the search bar in Facebook) to give users an easier way to find people and past posts. Fast forward today and Facebook would have more than 2 trillion posts in its search index and its users make more than 1.5 billion searches a day. Not hard to see why when we use it to search for friends, events and stories.
You and I know the power of social media in reaching out to bigger crowd. While you are contemplating to start a Facebook page as one of your content channels, consider the following about Facebook Profile vs Facebook Page:
1. Insights: Know your audience better
As an influencer looking to engage your audience better, nothing beats having insightful data at the end of your fingertips. Facebook insights enable you to know how your content is engaging your audience, setup benchmarking with fellow influencers within your niche (up to 5 Facebook pages), know what your audience like and don’t like, where they are from, and when they are online.
Without data, how are you going to measure your growth as an influencer?
2. Facebook offers
A great way to get some viral buzz going about your content is to run Facebook Offers. It’s an official way to promote an activity/deal/giveaways you have to your Facebook audience.
And when your fans and non-fans claim these offers, their friends see it.
Using a Facebook profile? Whoops, you can’t use Facebook Offers. So good luck on your strategy of pasting a link, driving them to your content to promote your audience engagement activities such as giveaways.
3. Profiles Limited to 5,000 “Friends”
If you continue to run your blog/content through a personal profile, it tells me that you don’t have very high aspirations for your efforts on Facebook. Since you are limited to 5,000 “friends,” you are seriously limited by your reach.
I don’t care if you’re a new kid in the block still exploring opportunities as an influencer. Everyone has plans to grow, and every influencer should have the potential growth to want to reach more than 5,000 people on Facebook. If you do, you’ll need to scale.
In a nutshell, if you have a Facebook page, great job for starting one. No worries if the page is not performing in the beginning. Your Facebook Page is always a work in progress in your journey turning followers into a community of your own.
Here’s some ways to make your Facebook page posts more searchable:
1. Choose the right name for your Facebook fan page
This may sound like a no-brainer. However, it’s the most basic step when it comes to optimizing your brand on Facebook, and is also the most important.
There is always the temptation to stuff your fan page name with tons of keywords as how one would with websites, like “John’s Bakery — Muffins, Bagels, Cookies, Breads — Catering & Events.”
In actuality, having a name like this can hurt your growth rate inside Facebook. If you appear too spammy, your fans will be less likely to engage with your page, let alone share posts and updates with their friends. In fact, people can even hide your updates from their news feed — imagine the horror!
Don’t be too generic either, though. Facebook’s intent behind fan pages is that they represent real businesses, brands, personalities, etc. By choosing something too generic, like Travel, Sports, Fishing, etc., you run the risk of Facebook shutting down your ability to post updates and reach out to new fans.
Quick Tip: The first word in your fan page title is given the most weight (importance) by Google.
2. Create a custom fan page vanity URL
Facebook gives your you the ability to create a unique URL (or usernames as Facebook calls them) for the page. Because URLs are heavily weighted by search engines, it is vital that your fan page URL reflects an aspect of your name/pseudonym.
A Facebook link with your name on it makes it search engine and human friendly. It’s much easier to remember www.facebook.com/jonathansiemens than www.facebook.com/22032944d. (This are sample links; they don’t work)
If, by some misalignment in the stars, you find that another fan page has claimed your business’ name already, make sure to include what your page is about in the URL.
3. Use keywords in strategic locations on your fan page
Just like traditional websites, keyword optimization is the most fundamental form of on-site SEO.
The most important pieces to pay attention to are the About section, Mission, and Company Description, since these areas are actually pulled from your fan page as SEO elements.
Here is an example of how a search engine would index your page:
SEO Title = Your fan page name
Meta Description = Fan page name + the About section of your page
H1 = Your fan page name
To optimize your page for local searches, it is very important to include your Address, City, State, and Zip. For product-related searches, the Company Overview, Mission, and Products fields should be filled in with your appropriate information.
Quick Tip: Just like your website’s meta data, you may want to consider using a brief, 140- character description for your fan page so your whole message displays in the search engine’s snippet.
4. Include your contact details
As surprising as it sounds, there are a good amount of influencers out there that don’t include this type of info on their fan page. As a majority of your traffic may be to your blog, it can appear to be not quite so important for you to include. But remember, making yourself reachable via email makes a difference.
While address plays a role as well, placing in the State or Country helps searchability.
Backlink to your fan page on existing channels eg blog, Instagram, YouTube accounts.
The more links pointing to your page, the more authoritative your page is according to Google, and you will be ranked higher. That is why it is very important to bloggers when they have their content linked to from other websites, blogs, etc.
This same principle applies to your Facebook fan page. So, where it is appropriate, include a link to your fan page from your other digital channels, like your website, blog, and Twitter profile.
5. Optimize Facebook fan page status updates
When posting updates to your Facebook wall, remember that the first 18 characters of a Facebook post serve as the meta description (this means they show up on Google search). So, take advantage of the option when Facebook prompts you to “Write something…” since that text will be considered the SEO title for that update. Including direct links to your small business website in your updates is also a good practice to follow.
Quick Tip: Just like your fan page’s name, Google places a higher importance on the first word of your update, so you may want to consider making that a keyword. Also, when you are sharing your blog post URL on FB, you can edit the pics, title, URL and most parts of it to better suit Facebook.
6. Sprinkle your business page with keywords strategically
Optimizing for keywords remains crucial, even when it comes to social media. Place your targeted ones in the most important, strategic parts of your page. Include them in the URL, page title and “About us” section because they will be visible on the front page and will appear in search results.
Remember that the name of your page corresponds with the title tag and your short description works as the meta description tag. However, make sure that you do not overuse keywords: stick to a top six and mention them naturally in the proper context.
7. New features that you should implement
Facebook is constantly introducing new useful tools that are going to make running your business easier. To keep your page well-optimized, make sure that you keep an eye on any new features that emerge and implement them when available.
Call to action on Facebook
Worth mentioning are call to action buttons for Facebook Pages introduced in December 2014. Thanks to the call to action, people can easily interact with your page. You can choose the suitable destination for your type of business and direct your followers to it. Here’s two(2) actions that are very useful for influencers like you:
- Sign Up — I will share with you the importance of having emails of your followers in a separate note.
- Contact Us
