The Maine SEO Blog

The number one thing I have missed since I switched from my Blackberry to my Droid HTC Thunderbolt, is by far Blackberry Messenger. It was a way for me to have a conversation with a group of people all at the same time, it was easier than texting and more importantly it was free. Now, Facebook has come out with a mobile app called “Facebook Messenger” that essentially does the same thing plus more… See the video from Facebook Live talking about it’s release.

1.  It’s Connected To Facebook: I can easily pop in a contact name of one of my friends and talk to them while they are at their computer.

2.  It’s not just for Facebook Users: Don’t think of Facebook Messenger as just another extension of Facebook, you should think of it as its own stand alone mobile app that allows you to message not only your Facebook friends, but those friends and people you know that aren’t on Facebook at all. If you message someone that isn’t on Facebook (or is currently offline) it sends the message as a text to their mobile device.

3.  Seamless Communication: Have you ever been chatting via a text message and the conversation isn’t over, but now you are sitting in front of your computer with a big keyboard in front of you and you are thinking how much easier it would be to just finish the conversation online? Well, now you can and it’s seamless, all your old messages will show up on the app on your phone and ones started on your phone will be right there in your Facebook messages.

4.  Geolocations and Photo Sharing: You can attach photos and include geographic locations to your messages. An example given is now when you tell someone you’ll be there in 10 minutes they can look at the map and get a pinpoint of your location to check. (So don’t lie!)

5.  Group Chat: You can have a conversation with multiple people without texting it to many and then having to individually answer and repeat things.  This came in handy when my grandmother was in the intensive care unit and the whole family needed to keep in touch (when I had Blackberry Messenger), now I can use Facebook messenger for group chat.

6.  Available on both Droid and iPhone: Available for iPhone and Android, you can download Facebook Messenger free via the Market or iTunes. Currently it’s only available in the U.S. and Canada but they are working on building out the app for all smartphones and countries.

7.  It’s FREE!: Both the app itself and then the messaging are free. Why sit there and rack up text message charges when you can use this free service? Brilliant.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Facebook Messenger Fan

In a recent article by the WSJ, they stated that Facebook is thinking of integrating ads into your news feed.

As of right now, it’s very difficult for advertisers to get in your news feed as that’s decided by the EdgeRank algorithm.  Sticking with the traditions of social media, if you can call them traditions in such a short period of time, would be preferred.  New media is supposed to be about the customer coming to you, not you sticking your ads in their face constantly without their permission.

Not only would these ads show up in your news feed, but you wouldn’t be able to hide them.  You know, like you do now when you get posts in your news feed from people that either post too much, you don’t really know or you just don’t want to hear what they’re saying/doing.

While obviously opening the feeds up so that advertisers would be more happy about their reach and the bang for their buck, it would come at a price.

I don’t know if Facebook wants to go there now that we have other options, ie. Google+.

Learn more over at the Atlantic Wire.

Joan Crocker Woodbrey
Just sayin’ “Don’t Mess With My News Feed”

Do you use your Facebook lists? Do you even know what they are? Not to worry, let’s review.

Background and Setup

Facebook Lists are a great way to organize your friends – you could create a client, coworker, and friend List. You can have up to 100 Lists at one time.

How do you get to Lists?

While making some things easier to get to with the redesign, I feel Facebook has made other things more difficult to navigate to. Regardless, to get to your Lists, navigate from your homepage to “Friends”.

From here, you have the ability to view, add, or edit all of your Lists.

How to add a Facebook List

Recently, Facebook’s changed its design, which also changes the way you add lists. First, go here. Then click “Create a List”, give your list a name (“Clients”, for example), then choose all of your friends you want to be apart of the list. That’s all there is to it!

Automatically add friends to a list

The initial setup – as with many things – is pretty time consuming for Lists at first. However, once you have all your Lists in order, you can add friends automatically when you friend them:

At first, Lists may not seem all that exciting, but there are actually quite a few ways you can effectively use them.

1. Privacy Settings

Want to block certain lists from seeing some things on your profile? No problem. Use your lists to more quickly manage your privacy settings.

2. See only your List’s statuses

Want to have the ability to only see certain statuses? Now you can. Personally, I use my Lists a lot like I would use TweetDeck columns – so I can specifically see certain people’s statuses, like the flyte crew:

3. Chat quicker

If you use Facebook chat, your Lists are a great way to distinguish which folks you’re trying to talk with.

4. Target easily

Have a page you want to suggest friends “like”? You don’t have to check them off, one-by-one anymore…just use your Lists! Simply click “Suggest to Friends”, click Filter Friends and the List you’d like to target, and finally “Select All”.

How to delete a List

Should you need to delete a list, Facebook has again hidden the option. Unfortunately what Facebook tells you has also changed:

How do I delete a Friend List?
To delete a Friend List, first select the list from the Friends page. After making your selection, the “Delete List” option will appear at the top of the page.

With the redesign, now you’ll need to click into the List you want to delete, scroll to the bottom and click “Delete List”:

Nicki Hicks
Facebook Lister

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Facebook Organic SEO & Naughty Ranking Tips

It’s hard to get in the SERPs for Facebook

aimClear tested 5 account (4 mature accounts, 1 totally new)

Personalization effects

These elements affect personalization and the way results appear when you’re logged in:

• You like it
• Your friend likes it
• You’ve got 2^nd degree friends
• You’ve been invited
• You’ve visited it before
• You’ve listed it as an interest on profile

Inside the autocomplete box

• 2-8 results
• “I’m feeling lucky”
• Masking crappy SERPs
• Most important to rank

How to rank in autocomplete box

• Your name
• Evens you are invited to
• Friend with keyword in name
• 2^nd degree friend with keyword in name
• Questions with keyword in it and number of answers
• App you’ve used
• Internal/external page and interest you have on profile
• Page friend likes (in tandem w/ number of friends and total likes)
• Group you have joined

Facebook SERP Anatomy

About All results

• Previous de facto search hub
• Requires additional click to see results
• All FB content types battle it out!

How to rank in All Results

• People – Friends or 2^nd degree friends with keyword in name
• Page – with enough like can beat friends…sometimes
• Keyword in posts by friends
• Web results (fueled by Bing)

About People results

• Purely human search
• Pay attention to filters!

How to rank for People results

• Keyword in friend or 2^nd degree friends (Name)
• Keyword in friend or 2^nd degree friends (workplace, school aka network)
• Keyword in anyone’s name/city/workplace/school/network

About Pages results

• Confusing
• Lumped together – admistered pages, community pages, non FB pages
• Heavily affected by personalization

How to rank for Pages results

• Too messed up to rank logically
• General guidelines – keywords play a large role, keyword density
• Put keywords – name, description

About Group results

• Being a member
• Friends are a member
• Keywords in title
• Number of members

About Event results

• Not based on geo
• Not based on friends attending
• Not based on invited
• Not really keyword relevant
• (basically, it sucks)

How to rank for Event results

• Get people to RSVP as attending (not maybe)
• Get people to visit page at least once
• Put your high value keyword  first
• Don’t make event names too long

About Apps results

• You are already a fan/user
• Your friend is a fan/user

How to rank for Apps results

• Keyword in title, body
• Buy fans/users

Facebook questions

• Often outrank more valuable/verteran content

How to rank for Questions

• Keyword in title, answer, in URL
• Multi-user engagement
• Generate something of value to community

Naughty to the Naughtiest ranking trick (Don’t do this at home)

• Facebook PPC and personalization
• Create ads to FB properties (those can’t help but click ads)
• Internal page destination has keyword rich title
• Shows up in search box
• Keyword rich profiles
• Gain friends somehow
• Wait a bit to get FB indexed
• Promote on your wall
• Create an even with keyword in title and body
• Invite non-friends (with just email address)
• Invitee types keyword  – they don’t even have to RSVP!
• Dominate search box for any keyword

Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

Facebook SEO

Facebook search is punctuation sensitive

Methods for ranking pages

• Use a relevant page name
• Build the number of fans (and number of fan friends)
• Engage in relevant current all searches
• Search results

Facebook Questions – Shows heavily in suggest box – not necessarily all search results

Facebook Events – Be aware of spam (because of messaging from events)

The Future? Page browser – see pages you’re a fan of and suggested pages

How to prepare for Facebook Page Browser? Ads – make sure you include likes and interests to drive traffic to page

Free Tricks to Boost Your Fans

• Charity – donate money to a charity to acquire fans
• Must be a fan to comment (or even see) wall; for every comment, we’ll give money
• Create exclusive content – “visible to connection” tag (If you want to see (coupons, % off, deal), then become a fan) Use it for: coupons, sales, etc.
• Typical method – “Find us on Facebook” = NOT GOOD; fix = use QR code instead, use for FB places too

Greg Finn, Cypress North

Facebook SEO

Optimizing your status updates in Facebook

• Status update doesn’t appear on public page, unless you plan ahead and do some research to have them show up
• Appears to be private/controlled page, search for the “open” page
• Include popular keywords
• Tag referenced pages to increase presence

Optimizing page code for Facebook

Use open graph code: opengraphprotocol.org (Yelp does a good job of this.)

Chris Silver Smith, KeyRelevance

Can you answer “Yes” to any one of these questions?

• Do you have a presence on Facebook already, but want more “likes” on your page?
• Do you have a presence on Facebook already, but want to drive more traffic to your website?
• Do you have a new fan page that needs to build up fans (or “likes”)?

Then Facebook ads are right for you. Facebook ads are inexpensive, intuitive, and, when done the right way, have the ability to drive a ton of traffic.

In the past week, I’ve gone step-by-step through creating Facebook ads. They’re all linked here…so get ‘em while they’re hot.

1. Create ad: Create and Target
2. Create ad: Bidding and Review
3. Measuring and Reporting
4. Measuring Conversions
5. Making sense of the data

Nicki Hicks
Like flyte on Facebook

In Facebook, the line blurs between fan pages and personal pages. Creating events is just another time that line blurs.

If you’re trying to create a personal event, you’ll find the quick setup at the right hand side of your homepage.

If you’re trying to create a fan page event, start by going to your fan page. Then follow these steps:

1. Click “edit page”.



2. Scroll down to the “Events” section. Click edit.
   



3. Create your event, edit the details, then invite any of your (personal) friends.
4. You can’t send fans an email like you can with group members, but you can send them an update. Go to your event page, and click “Update fans of [your fan page]“.
   



5. Craft a message to go along with your event invite and send!

That’s all there is to it. Now get out there and start creating some events!

Nicki Hicks
Invite your fans, not your friends

Some people just don’t want to be on Facebook – and that’s ok – because they still understand the importance of having a business presence there.

Not to worry, you can still create a fan page for your business without having a personal account. But, you need to understand that:

• Facebook will push you every step of the way to create a personal account.
• You will be limited in what you can do with only a Page (or business account), and no personal account.

Here’s all the information that Facebook provides on the matter:

What is the difference between a business account and a user profile?
Business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer Pages and their ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same functionality as personal accounts. Business accounts have limited access to information on the site. An individual with a business account can view all the Pages and Social Ads that they have created, however they will not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the Pages they administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search and cannot send or receive friend requests.

Your limitations, as (only) a Facebook business account

• You won’t be able to link to your Twitter account
• Your basic information will be limited to year founded, and not:
  • Address
  • Phone number
  • Hours of operation
• Your detailed information about your business will be limited to website, overview, mission, and products, and not:
  • Parking
  • Public transit
• You won’t have the ability to tag (your personal) friends in photos
• You won’t be able to invite your (personal) friends to become fans
• You won’t be able to add any admins. (You can only add friends as admins.)
• You won’t be able to get a vanity URL.

Note: This list may be a partial one, but it’s what I’ve noticed so far. (What limitations have you noticed?)

Unless you have an incredibly important reason for not tying your Facebook account to your personal account, I would suggest doing so. Look at all the cool things you can do!

Nicki Hicks
Being a person FTW

Do you know who they are?

Sadly, many business owners don’t know who their audience is. A local Mom-and-Pop variety store may be entirely unaware of who they should be targeting.

So step one: figure out who your customers are.

Just ask

Seems silly, but why do all sorts of research and do little more than guess when you can find out for sure? Simply say, “Oh by the way, I was just wondering where you spend your time online. Do you have a favorite social network?”

Maybe your audience isn’t online, and therefore you don’t need to spend time there. You’ll find out pretty quickly where most of them lie: whether it’s on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or maybe a niche social media site that you’ve never even heard of. Asking is the easiest way to find out – and it’s far easier than guessing.

Be where your people are

After you find out where people are…go there. They may be on multiple channels, and that doesn’t mean you have to devote your time to all of them. Pick one if that’s all the time your resources allow; but sign up for all of them.

MySpace

For the right kind of business (and audience), MySpace could be lethal (in a good way). For musicians and new bands, MySpace has been a huge key to success.

With the ability, unlike most social networks, to customize backgrounds and profiles, MySpace is truly a brandable network.

Facebook

Create your personal profile first, then a business fan page. Starting suggesting that friends fan your business, and then start reaching out beyond your friends. You can search for specific keywords within your network; or simply keywords within profiles – depending on privacy settings.

Facebook ads are another way to gain fans. Right now, they’re ultra-targeted and relatively cheap per click.

Twitter

If your customer base is on Twitter, sign up and build out your profile (including a custom background). Search for people you already know and start following them. Then go to Twitter Search and find some gurus in your industry by searching for keywords in your line of business. Check out Nearby Tweets for tweeps in your area and start following them.

Download an app like TweetDeck and track keywords in either your industry or your physical location. By doing this, you’ll no longer need to search constantly on Nearby Tweets or a similar geo-locating tool. Also, make sure you track your business name. That way, if someone talks about you (positive or negative), you’ll be right there, ready to respond accordingly.

LinkedIn

If your audience is on LinkedIn, you should be too! Create a personal profile page, along with a business profile page. Then make sure everyone in your organization is on LinkedIn and become connected with them. Then, look for your audience. Start with people you know.

Begin joining groups – even creating some around your line of work. Be sure to check the Answers section in order to become the expert in your industry. Both Groups and Answers are great places to find people to become connected with.

You’re not done yet

Now that you’ve found your audience, make sure you continue to search for new fans, friends, connections, and followers constantly. Consistently engage with these people – no matter what network you’re on.

Nicki Hicks
Go where the people are

In May, Google announced they’d be adding more to the “Suggest” function. Up until now, I hadn’t noticed; but perhaps that’s because I rarely search from google.com.

Yesterday, I found it helpful:

However, if, as Search Engine Land suggests, there will be AdWords included Suggest, I can only imagine this space will be overcrowded in no time.

That begs the question…

Isn’t less more?

Time and time again, seemingly simplistic interfaces seem to become complicated. Look at Facebook and Twitter…

Facebook added a news feed, which has more recently become a real time news feed. Certainly, there are reasons for such changes; but at a certain point is evolving for just evolution’s sake?

Twitter recently added a retweet function from its website. Seemingly helpful, it’s done nothing other than muddle up the simplistic interface they had going. This function, in particular, received nothing but bad reviews.

Certainly Google couldn’t be the next monopoly to be pressured to overcrowd in an effort to be cutting edge. Dearest Google, simple is good. Simple is why you are king.

Fortunately, more often than not, Google will test ideas relentlessly before they leave Labs. But it’s something to think about.

Nicki Hicks
Website minimalist

This week, I gave two presentations (or rather, the same presentation, twice) for a senior Business Seminar class at Saint Joseph’s College. Though it’s always nice going back to my alma mater, more so than usual, I feel for the senior class.

A year and a half ago, it was easier to find a job. Obviously, it took some work, but it’s nowhere near the type of competitive environment these soon-to-be grads face in the next 6 months of their job search. So how are you supposed to differentiate yourself in such an atmosphere? Why, with social media, of course!

The full presentation is in Slideshare below, but here are some of the key points:

• On Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter already? Great…now go in and clean up and fill out your profiles. Not on them? Join! (Note: only join Twitter if you can devote the time to it.)
• The next step: go above and beyond. Engage people by friending/fanning, following, and connecting with the right people and groups.
• Jobs in ME/VT/NH and many of your other favorite job listing sites have a presence on all of the major social media networks. Why go to their website everyday when you can engage them via Twitter? or Facebook? or even an RSS feed?
• A really neat find: when I was doing research for the presentation, I stumbled upon some video resumes on YouTube – what better way to add depth to your resume? But be careful – you have to do your video resume the right way; check out the presentation for tips and tricks for YouTube!