8 Tips For Getting Your Fan Page Found In Facebook Search

Have a Facebook page or creating a new one? Do yourself a favor and be proactive in setting your page up, so users can find you when they are looking. Too often, companies and brands don’t take the proper steps to be found and have to make adjustments in order to show in Facebook search. Whether you are setting up your first page, or tweaking an old one,  the following tips can help you rise to the top of the search results.

Use your brand for your Facebook page name

When naming your Facebook page, you only have one shot at giving it a “name.”  This is what shows up as the title of the page and is created when first setting a page up. This is currently the largest indicator for Facebook search and is make or break for your page being found.

While it might seem simple that you would choose your brand name, it is not always cut and dry.  For example, let’s say we are making a fan page for Search Engine Land. Many times people could create the page with the name titled “SearchEngineLand.com” which would severely handicap your chances of being shown in Facebook search. Similarly, you should keep it simple and not get fancy with the name. Say that the NFL wanted to create a fan page. Well, instead of registering the “National Football League” keyword research should be done to see if “NFL” garners more interest. Don’t try to get cutesy with the naming of pages (like “Comcast Cares”) and make sure you use spaces and full words. While something like SouthwestAir would work for Twitter, you would rather have “Southwest Airlines” for being found in Facebook search in order for maximum visibility.

Build your following

If the Facebook page name is top criteria for being found in Facebook search, the fan count is second place. At SMX East in the Facebook Marketing Panel, Marty Weintraub really stressed this fact and couldn’t emphasize enough how important fan numbers (or group or application numbers) were for being found in the Facebook search results pages. If you have the same name as other pages (which is a common occurrence), the page with more followers should show up first.

Leverage Facebook Ads to help build a following as advertising your pages can help boost fans of your page. You can also leverage employee profiles or groups that you are a part of to really help boost your group numbers.

Create a branded Facebook username

While this may not play a major role in being found within the internal Facebook search, the URL structure can play an important role in getting ranked in the major search engine results pages.  Being found within these pages can clearly help to boost your fan following from those who may be searching outside of Facebook. While we have not seen a direct correlation between usernames and internal Facebook rankings, having a keyword rich username could an indicator in the future and would be considered best practice.

Create fresh content regularly

Wall posts, events and “posts by everyone” can now be displayed in Facebook Search. By creating regularly updated content, you will significantly increase your chances for being shown.  Simple wall posts with branded keywords or branded events will give you extra visibility in the new real time Facebook Search.

Leverage domain equity to boost Facebook pages in SERPs

Again, this is a bit of a secondary tactic, but providing a link from your homepage to your Facebook page should help to get your Facebook page ranking for branded terms.  Think of it as proactive reputation management for your brand. Getting people to your page via Google, Yahoo! or Bing can really boost up those fans to your page thereby trickling down to those Facebook Search ranking factors.

Advertise on branded “interests”

While this won’t boost you into the natural Facebook search results, this will allow you to show up on selected terms. While Facebook ads still run off of “interests” rather than keywords, bidding solely on extremely targeted interests, you can boost your possibility of being found. In addition, Facebook does run select Microsoft-network ads, so advertising in adCenter could help you sneak in and steal some of that Facebook search traffic (if you know what you are doing).

Fill in all information about your brand/company

Whether it be the information boxes, mission statements, website or descriptions these could be indicators down the road. While the information isn’t currently helping your pages show in Facebook results pages, it can also help those pages in external Search Engines as most page content is indexed. The more relevant the content, the better. While these sections might not play a role in internal Facebook ranking, there is evidence that it can help the ranking of groups.  This could be applied to pages in the future (and should IMO).

Spend a little time optimizing your site for bing

If you need one reason to pay attention to Bing, it could be for the sole fact that it displays the web results in Facebook Pages. You will always find those web results at the bottom of the Facebook Search, so spend a little time working your site for Bing and you could see a big payoff from the Facebook search platform.

These tips should help your visibility in Facebook search and help to take your fan page to new heights!