Know the Ropes

To start, you can be liked – you don’t have to worry about friending. Friend requests slow down how fast your image spreads. Additionally, when searching, personal profiles are not as likely to come up as a business profile. When you are discovered, all the viewer has to do is like you (plus this appears on their personal site for their friends to see). This works well for word-of-mouth marketing strategies.

Then you have other strategies that are open to business but restricted from use by personals. You can run contests and operate uniquely as a business. You can also provide special offers through your business profile. When offers are accepted by a customer, their friends see what it was and who it came from. You can’t do that with “friends.” Additionally, personal profiles tend not to look as professional. You want your business to appear established and thorough.

Make the Most of Opportunities

You must also consider limiting opportunity – personal profiles have a cap of 5,000 friends, but business profiles have no cap. Anyone and everyone can become a viewer of your business profile. Then consider how Facebook functions. Profiles are initially set to default to view “most” of what their friends post (most individuals are not aware of this). This isn’t the same for business pages. You can reach more people with a business page than with a personal profile. More visual opportunity opens new doors for potential customers.

You’ll also have connection to Facebook Places. Give yourself a marker on the map. Personals rely on “places you’ve been,” so why not make your business one of those places that your clients have been. This is a tool that is often underrated, but works incredibly well.

Consider Your Audience

When a personal profile friends another, personal info is made available to them. Customers may not want to provide their personal info to a business. This makes it more difficult for an individual to “friend” a business. You may have individuals who appreciate your business but don’t want you to see or know everything about them.

A business profile also allows you to maintain business relevance. Friends see random postings, videos and personal information. A business profile allows for open discussion and reaches a larger group of people (even those who haven’t “liked” your page yet). Business pages provide a better stage for discussion and sharing.

Facebook has two faces: personal and business. It’s always good to separate the two because they are so very different. If you’re going to use Facebook for business, be sure you apply your strategies and tools the right way so you can make the most of your social outlet opportunity.

Google and other engines are monitoring and indexing what’s happening on social networks today. Public Facebook pages, trending topics in Twitter, blog posts, as well as photos, videos and all manner of content that is shared and created on social media platforms are now being viewed and scanned by search engine crawlers. For this reason, the running of your brand’s social profiles will benefit greatly by employing some SEO-know-how to your social chats and sharing.

Here are four tips to make your social media more optimized and, thus, more successful in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Choose Your Target Terms Much as you Would with SEO

To optimize any content that is associated with your brand, whether on your website or your social profile, it is essential to identify your high-value key target terms or keywords and phrases.

Focus on the top 50 to 100 most popular and relevant terms related to your brand – too many unrelated keywords will effectively water down your SEO strategy. Be specific and make a concrete list of terms that you will be aiming to target.

Use Your Target Terms, Hashtags, and Links Liberally in Your Updates and Tweets

As mentioned above search engines are definitely indexing tweets -especially promoted tweets or those by high profile account holders. Make the most of the opportunity by including your key words whenever it seems relevant. Remember, no one wants to hear the same words being repeated over and over – you are not a spambot and no follower wants you to sound like one. Always use keywords at the right time when it is logical and relevant to do so.

Use Your Target Terms and Links in Your Blog Titles and Copy

Since social media is one of the most popular channels through which to share any kind of content your brand creates, it makes sense to include your valuable key terms in that copy wherever you can. Blogs are a great place to create and showcase branded content and will be the primary place where you will have full control over what copy, tags and images to use. Blog posts that will eventually be shared via social media needs to optimized and keywords in the heading, links and tags are a good place to start.

Use Your Target Terms and Links in All of Your Content, Posting Descriptions

Many social media sites allow users to post descriptions about the content they are sharing. This not only makes the content more understandable and user-friendly for the other users who see your post, but it also makes it more visible to search engine crawlers. Include thorough descriptions using your most valuable keywords in:

·The ‘about’ section on your Facebook page
·The ‘about’ you section on your Twitter profile
·Video titles and descriptions in YouTube
·Pinterest pins

Social media plays an important part in any SEO strategy and by incorporating tried and tested SEO principles into your brand’s social media, you will increase your chances of popping up in the SERPs.