Facebook Business Pages Best Practice

Whilst Google has little indexing power over your Facebook Personal content, it does see a lot of your Facebook Business Page content and as such there should be some Facebook Business Pages Best Practice which should form part of your on-line marketing strategy.

There are some very basic, but essential Facebook Business Pages Best Practice that all photographers should consider.

1. Get a Facebook Business Page
   Any professional photographer out there who doesn’t have a Facebook Business Page is shutting themselves away from a huge amount of potential clients.  Client count alone the viral marketing opportunities presented to you simply by having a business presence on Facebook is huge.Whilst you do need to have a Facebook Personal profile in order to operate a Facebook Business Page – you don’t necessarily need to embrace the whole Facebook Personal pages paradigms.  Many people who don’t want to use Facebook for a personal social network simply create a personal profile in order to run a business page.
2. Facebook Business Page Vanity URL
   The vanity URL is the “well formed” URL that you can request Facebook deliver your Business Page as.  You need to have a minimum of 25 “likes” to get a vanity URL.  Up until that point your Facebook Business Page URL may look something like this:

   facebook.com/pages/yourbusiness/12345678

   Really, one of your Facebook Business Pages best practice ideas would be to correct this to something like:

   http://www.facebook.com/GloucestershireWeddingPhotography

   In order to do this, simply head over to http://www.facebook.com/username and follow the prompts.  Remember to pick an title for your Facebook page that will be useful in the search engines as well as

   describe your business.  For example a vanity URL of /kevinsphotographer is nowhere near as powerful as /gloucestershireweddingphotography.

3. Include the really important stuff in your description
   I think this is one of the most important Facebook Business Pages Best Practice features.  In order for Google to to pick up relationships with your Facebook Business Page – it needs to see the URL of your website at the very least.  You should include this, along with a brief overview of your business in the description box of your Facebook Business Page.

   By doing this you are also giving yourself a far greater chance of a click through from your business page to your website.  As powerful as Facebook and the business pages are, ultimately, I try and use Facebook as a conduit to my primary website.There are additional strong SEO benefits to this too.  You will notice when Facebook Business Pages appear in the Google Search Results there is a direct correlation with the content circled above, and the content circled below:

   So you can see the relationship between correctly setting up your Facebook Business Page and your Search Engine Ranking details.

4. Use the full feature set of Facebook Business Pages
   There are masses of apps and native tabs available to you as a business page owner in Facebook.  I have started to use the Video plugin, along with a Blog feed.  Highly under-used is the Notes feature of your Facebook Business Page.  These notes are indexed by Google and as such it’s worth investing some thought and concentration into the content and their SEO footprint.
5. Facebook as a conduit
   As I mentioned earlier, I want Facebook to be a conduit to my website, not a replacement.  I’m listing several Facebook Business Pages Best Practice here but ultimately I want to use Facebook to drive traffic to my site.  As such, it’s important to always be giving people a route through to your photography business site.  Facebook and the Facebook Business Pages should be their to enhance and grow your brand – it shouldn’t be there to replace and be the back bone of your brand or business.  Every time I put content into my Facebook Business Page I want to drive traffic to my site.  I rarely want people to sit looking at Facebook….because I don’t sell wedding photography on Facebook:

So, in summary, the above are the very minimum Facebook Business Pages Best Practice that I think all photographers should be following.  In a future article, I’m going to explore in more detail Facebook Affinity (the way Facebook deals with your relationship strength) and the seemingly every changing world of Promotions and adverts that Facebook are taking the route of more often than not these days.  There is also a more advanced and in-depth Facebook Business Pages Best Practice article that I’m currently researching and will be publishing that in the New Year.

As always, I really hope you enjoyed the post “Facebook Business Pages Best Practice” here on Photography Web Tips  – but more importantly that you got some use out of it.  Please, share and link if you are so inclined to do so.  Feel free to leave comments and I will reply to each one.