Can FaceBook make a positive difference for your business? Is FaceBook a valid SEO (search engine optimisation) element? Can FB make a difference to your website’s traffic volumes? Can it deliver you more enquiries, or some potential buyers of your products and services? Will FB traffic even register on the webserver traffic logs in the “referring sites” section?
Those are all good questions, and I’m so glad you asked…
Personally, I’ve always had a disparaging, jaundiced view of FaceBook and SEO. I could not see how the demographics and purpose of FaceBook could be harnessed to deliver potential clients to MY business.For a start, I’ve been reluctant to mix business and personal / family life – I don’t want “Friends of Friend’s” friends to be harassing my friends and family, children with friendship invitations etc. Business is business… family is family…
Those thoughts were published in a previous post: FaceBook SEO 
Testing The FaceBook Premise…
Its Sunday morning, 20th March… Its hot and sunny, I’ve got Willie Nelson’s rendition of “Seven Spanish Angels” blasting out on the stereo – part of a cultural awakening therapy for my neighbours… 
The aroma of a fresh coffee fills the home/office space… Hey, things could be a hell of a lot worse!
Over the last week, I’ve been 14×7 neck-deep in a series of website rebuilds at www.Website-Designers.net.nz and upgrades (incl. this site) across my modest www empire. Subconsciously, there’s been some pondering on the FB phenomenon going on for quite some time. Whilst wondering if there’s any way to achieve a measurable result from messing about with some blatant self-promotion on FB, it occured to me that there’s only one way to find out – Suck it and SEE!
A Plan So Cunning, You Could Pin a Tail on it and Call it a Weasel
So, in any plan to gain traction on Social Media, we’d obviously need some incremental steps in the process. Starting from zero, with no accounts, no friends, no links… NOTHING… Just like a web newbie… Here is what I’ve done;
- Create a new FaceBook account and an associated Business Page: www.facebook.com/pages/The-SEO-Guy-NZ
- Add links on my websites to my FB and other Social Media accounts – displayed in the right-side menu on all website pages
- Add the FB “Like” plugin to my WordPress-based websites – this displays the “Be the first of your friends to like this page” button at top and bottom of all pages and posts!
- Tried to create a basic advertisement on FaceBook, and set it to run until the end of the month (Mar 2011). Sadly, the page locked up in the PayPal payment process and failed to complete the transaction…
- Created this post to get the ball rolling along faster…
- Linked to this post from my business and personal accounts on Facebook, and also from Twitter
- Opened the Post for “comments” – due to excessive spam volumes, I’ve not previously enabled comments but it may prove illuminating to see what ideas and suggestions others may have to offer.
That’s got the engines running, and we’re now taxiing out to the runway…
What YOU Can Do
Lets get this show off the ground. If you want to participate in this test, you can help by doing any/all of the following;
- Visit www.facebook.com/pages/The-SEO-Guy-NZ – click the “LIKE” button
- Click the “LIKE” button on any page on this site!
- Click the Like button on any page on www.Website-Designers.net.nz
- Ask all your friends to participate in this clicking on “Like” buttons- hey, that’s how a “real-world” business startup begins!
IF you’ve ever wondered IF FaceBook was worth your time and effort from a business perspective, if there was any way of measuring a demonstrable return on efforts… THEN you should join in…
Measuring the Progress
Basically, I’ve scorned FaceBook previously, and in retaliation it has of course never delivered ANY traffic my way…
- Therefore, my web server logfiles don’t register any visitors from FaceBook…
- Therefore, ANY referrals from this point onwards are a result of The Plan.
At month ends, I’ll do the following:
- I’ll add the Referring URL’s listing and we’ll see if FaceBook traffic starts to register on the gauges…
- You’ll be able to see “LIKE” increases (if any) on the individual website’s pages
- You should immediately “LIKE” this page now!
- I’ll list the website’s “Keyword Visibility Index” charts, and we will see if the social media element really does impact on rankings, as some senior SEO theorists have postulated since the Google “Farmer” algorithm update earlier this month.
- I’ll report on overall visitor traffic increases (if any) since launching the campaign
As mentioned – if you’ve got a constructive theory on how to drive FaceBook traffic to a website, we’re all ears…
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