Facebook Pages 101 for Small Business Owners
Almost every company invariably ends up with a Facebook page these days. Most companies worth their salt already have one. It is also estimated that 27.5% of all external referral traffic to Facebook pages come from Google. This only shows how important Facebook pages really are. SEO professionals must take these statistics into account and work towards optimizing Facebook pages to drive more traffic, and also help companies and individuals to engage their customers and audience.
Importance of Facebook Page views
Jeff Widman at PageLever analysed 1000 pages over a period of 6 months and concluded that Google not only sends 1/3 of external referrer traffic to Facebook pages, but also sends 10 times more traffic than Bing, and 5 times more than Yahoo to Facebook Pages. It is a proven fact that optimizing Facebook Pages would result in doubling of page views. The importance of search engines in driving traffic to Facebook Pages highlights the importance of search engine optimization. SEO professionals should concentrate more on Google than Yahoo or Bing, as their contribution in driving traffic to Facebook Pages is much lesser. Admins must make sure that they have SEO friendly URLs and that they publish links often on their websites, which are posted on Facebook Pages as well. Encouraging visitors to ‘Like’ a company’s Facebook Page would also make it more search-friendly.
Tips to Optimize Facebook Pages
Monitoring and Analysing Facebook Pages Data
There are several ways to monitor and analyse progress on Facebook Pages. Facebook Insights provides metrics and page tab analytics, which help you to track Facebook sharing, Likes, etc. Facebook Insights can be accessed by page administrators. It is also possible to monitor fan growth on a monthly basis, and the Fan Growth Graph does just that.
Fan Demographics and Fan Geography tell you who your target audience are and where they are located. This helps you to hone your SEO strategies and marketing plans in a way that might drive more traffic.
Level of Interactions helps you to monitor what type of interactions your fans prefer. This can be gauged through Likes, comments and unsubscribes. Apart from Facebook’s own insights, you could also use Google Analytics in order to get visitor statistics, traffic sources, keyword searches and map overlays. FBML application allows you to place your Google analytics custom code inside Facebook Pages. Google Analytics provides detailed usage statistics which help you to plan your SEO strategies. It can also help you to design marketing campaigns depending on the kind of traffic that is driven to your website.
Third Party Tools
There are also third party tools that can help in assessing metrics and provide valuable insight. One of them is the Webtrends tool. In fact, third party tools are built to compensate for the limitations of Facebook’s inbuilt measurement service.
Whether you use third party tools, Google Analytics of Facebook’s own insights, what is important is to remain active on Facebook Pages, and to engage your audience. The more targeted your engagement is, the better shall be your results.
