What do 137,468,600 Americans have in common? They're all on Facebook.

Over 1/4 of Internet users have a Facebook account. If you're not already taking advantage of Facebook and leveraging Google's social search to help build your business, you are missing out big time and leaving $ on the table.

Written Mar 09, 2011, read 696 times since then.

Recently Hubspot, one of my favorite in-bound Internet marketing companies, hosted a Facebook Marketing webinar with Social Fresh (cool website that helps you learn what social media can really do for the bottom line of your business). Over 6,000 signed up to participate, forcing Hubspot to do a quick about-face and upgrade the webinar hosting service they were using to accommodate the larger-than-anticipated crowd and that about says it all … but let me elaborate further and share with you some of the most valuable tidbits and there were a lot of them!

First let me preface this with admission that I am indeed a Facebook nut (FBN) and someone who has already figured out the value in using Custom tabs on Facebook to ensure brand consistency, engage with online communities of fans, and boost search engine rankings (latter little known SEO strategy that very few seem to be taking advantage of but that will change over night I'm sure).

For those who aren't FBN's yet, the most common Facebook mistakes businesses make today are:

creating profiles instead of pages (albeit with the roll out of fundamental upgrades to Facebook last week I'm think folks won't fall into this trap as easily),
using Facebook for self-promotion instead of brand and community building,
posting Wall content that is not engaging, shareable, or compelling (btw, the most popular content on Facebook right now is … you guessed it … Facebook!),
pushing fans off Facebook to their websites (hint: people on Facebook want to stay on Facebook so drive them to other Custom tabs or include your call to action on your Facebook landing page), and
not taking advantage of all eyeballs and explicitly reminding visitors to LIKE the page.

FBNs probably already know this but if not, the BIG news is Facebook rolled out Custom tabs that now support iFrames, standard html (replacing FBML), javascript etc which means you can embed meta tags, directly pull in content from your website, and use tracking software such as Google Analytics, and so much more! I get goose bumps just thinking about this and have been experimenting with different Custom tab plug-ins over the last week for my clients and I'm sold!

Finally, here's some other potentially new nitty-gritty tips for fellow FBNs that I'm now putting into action:

best time to post Wall content on Facebook is on the weekends and early in the morning before folks start their day,
optimal frequency for posting new content is every-other-day, and
Hyper Alerts email notifications on new visitor comments and postings are much better than the new built-in Facebook alert system.

Hubspot will be sending out a transcript of the webinar tomorrow so if you missed it and want to read more about how to market with Facebook drop me an email and I'll send you a copy.

Immediately on the heels of the Facebook rollout was Google's change to its search algortihm which begs the question: should social search change your search engine optimization strategies? (And also makes one wonder if this was really coincindental timing ... )

Anyhoo, the answer is without a doubt! I received the post below from Hubspot and I wanted to elaborate on this topic and also bring their blog to your busy eyeballs. I've been doing research on this because a few of my clients have been asking for help with search engine optimization (SEO). The goal of SEO has always been that we have to place high in keyword search. Now, it seems that Google has changed its algorithm (albeit I hold no grudges because, as is evident in past blogs and on my website, IMHO Google Apps is a no-brainer IT solution and those not leveraging Google are spending too much time and $ on IT but I digress ...).

Here's the big news: Google announced that is has upgraded its search engine to include social results for users signed into their Google accounts. This means that people will start seeing search results from their friends on Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc. Ironic that this all comes on the heels of Facebook also rolling out a major upgrade.

Anyhoo, this is going to be really really big. I've already seen Facebook pages rank high in organic search results for my clients and not only on Google but also Yahoo and Bing and I've managed to sneak smaller fish into the big pond because we've nabbed a keyword and used that in our Facebook user-friendly URL. BTW, if you haven't already gotten a user-friendly Facebook URL (e.g., www.facebook.com/NextGenVITConsulting) you should jump on this ASAP and -- FREE SEO HINT HERE -- use your targeted keyword in your URL before your competition does. Note you need 25 LIKES on your page before this option becomes available in your Facebook account manager.

And here's Hubspot's 2 cents:

Rank Doesn’t Matter Anymore
With this latest update from Google, rank officially died as a metric for businesses to obsess over. It now doesn’t matter if you rank in the top slot for a certain keyword, because Google is quickly scaling personalized and social search. This means that everyone who searches will see a different page of results, based on their location, search history and their connections across the social web.

Marketing Takeaway
Stop obsessing over rank and keyword stuffing. Instead, focus your time and effort on creating amazing blog content and distributing it through social media. Develop strategies and prioritize engagement on each social platform to help build reach that brings organic search traffic to your website.

For a full understanding of these new changes, watch the new video explaining social search improvements from Google on the link below.

Learn more about the author, Kerry Martin.

Posted by Tami Smith, Kirkland, Washington | May 07, 2011

I like the conclusions; rank doesn't matter and focus on amazing content.

Here's my two cents: Relevancy still matters, even more so now.

My goal is to know and love my "just right clients" and cater to them in everything I do. Keyword Targeting is respecting my future clients enough to speak their language and attract them by being in the right place at the right time; especially in search results. Nothing like being the perfect answer to your ideal clients question.