Facebook is big news this week. With open-graph search it’s imposing itself as a social media network transitioning towards search engine goodness. Facebook’s traffic is sure to spike up in the next weeks while people play with the open-graph search.
Turn their play into your profit
We’ve released an article about how to integrate open-graph on your blog. We got that out of the way. But did you know that with the open-graph search Facebook can actually return your links as results due to the Facebook crawlers being able to read the open graph metadata in them? That sure looks a lot like what a search engine would do. Remember who gave you that information when your bandwidth is more crowded than Central Square, NY on New Year’s Eve.
Get more active on Facebook. Covering anything trendy is the sure way to go. If your audience is a bit more niche try writing for second degree viewers (audience of your audience). It might be a long shot but all it takes is a few well placed shares and you’re on your way to viral-ville.
Increasing your share rate
It’s a known scientific fact that articles are shared at least once during their lifespan. Be it by your own click or that of someone close to you. So it’s not as much a question of “How to get shared?” as it is of “Sorry sir, could you direct me to viral-ville?”.
5 valuable tips you might want to consider following when writing your article and creating your description snippet:
1. Be consistent. Stay consistent. – Keep your activity on Facebook high. Remind your followers you’re there and you’re watching. Just don’t turn into Sauron. No one really liked him. Well…except Melkor.
2. Use eye-candy. Eye-bleach. Just use images – Make sure the images you’re using is catchy and grabs attention. Just like Dean Craig Pelton from the NBC hit TV Show “Community”.
3. 50% of the time, all the time it’s about timing.– This depends on the type of content or business you’re running. Do your research. Check your competitors. See what hours work best for you.
4. Keep your description brief and catchy – 3 to 4 paragraphs are more than sufficient to get the fish in the hook.
5. Have a CTA – CTA is not some sort of federal agency responsible with your safety. It’s a Call To Action. Encourage and enable your followers to like, comment and share your content. If you make people interested in your content they’ll raise you to the heavens.
Stay classy
You’re most likely human. Just like your audience. Try and apply your principles to your habits. If you dislike a Facebook page that spams status updates every 5 minutes, be sure your audience will to. Don’t become that person everyone ignores because he’s too intrusive.
It’s all about finding the right balance. Post relevant content but don’t spam it. Instead find the right place and time for it. If Facebook is indeed becoming more and more like a conventional search engine for the social network it grew, be sure they’ll ultimately take Google’s path when it comes to ideals. They most likely won’t penalize duplicate content since at it’s base Facebook is a sharing network but spam is sure to get the ban-hammer at some point in the future.
Stay relevant to your content, post and share appropriately and act like a human being. I can’t stress the latter enough. The internet is not the place for formalities. Everyone’s equal here. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing this article dressed in my Pokémon pajamas(This article was written on a Friday. A casual Friday for that matter) while you’re reading it wearing a J. Crew $500 suit . All ideas and opinions start equally here. So interact with people that follow you in a humane personal way. People grow more accustomed and trusty when associating your brand or content with a figure they can associate with. This will also increase conversation potentials and with Google’s hummingbird search engine update you’re sure to increase your ranking.
Social search engine: Google vs Facebook
It was obvious the second Google released Google+ that if their social platform would kick off and Facebook would want to keep up the game they would have to develop accordingly.
Google+ is directly integrated into the search engine indexing and ranking algorithms. That’s one of the main reasons more and more businesses are showing their faces on Google+.
Facebook probably wouldn’t have gone this path if not for Google and the fact that they went public and have to respond to a higher number of people and grow based on a general consensus. Open-Graph could have (and still can) gone a whole different way. They could have focused more on the social-human part of the network instead of social-sharing.
It’s not a matter of growing bigger, it’s a matter of keeping their users. And the number of people who feel the social giant is becoming ever-more intrusive will only rise.
