The Use of Facebook Group in Marketing a Brand and How It Affects SEO

Online marketing (or digital marketing) – a diversified specialty, covering search engine optimization, social media marketing, affiliate marketing and various other quick and effective strategies.

In today's competitive business scenario, it is high time for businesses that haven’t already started with online marketing to give it serious consideration and choose professional assistance of an Internet marketing agency or at least start to improve their own skills in online business promotion.

As far as the retail market is concerned, the holiday season accounts for a large percentage of their annual sales. Therefore, it is essential to be well prepared for these peak seasons in advance. When you think of social media, the first and foremost name that comes across your mind is, without a doubt, Facebook.

There are nearly 1.18 billion people logging into Facebook on a daily basis. It is also estimated that an average user checks his or her Facebook newsfeed nearly 14 times a day. No matter which target group you are focusing on, Facebook is the best place to initiate your social media marketing endeavors.

SMM with Facebook

Social media marketing on Facebook is not an easy affair as there are tons of noises already out there and the organic views are also down. So, if you want to effectively market through this popular social media platform, you have to do something special rather than simply playing with branded content. Let’s discuss further.

Facebook group

An ideal way to reach to your target audience is by creating a Facebook group. Similar to other common social media tools, you need to know few best practices to follow. Let us take a quick glance at the process below.

How to create a Facebook group

You can skip this part if you already know how to do it. For those who don't, here is all the info you need to know to get started:

• Log in to your individual Facebook Page.

• Click on the “groups” button at the left side.

• You reach to the main group page and then click on the “create a group” button at the right-hand corner.

• Next, select the objective of your group by entering the “goal” of your group. It can be a “connectshare” group or a buy and sell one.

• You can then put a name to your group and choose an icon for it. Pick whichever icon is appropriate for the theme of your group.

• Add members. Always ask before adding someone.

• Choose the privacy settings carefully as open, closed, or secret etc.

• Choose an icon to represent your group. This shows up in the group sidebar for members and in notifications.

Marketing through Facebook group

You can use the Facebook group to connect to your followers, release new products and offers, extend product support, or collect feedback on new services or products. You need to be moderate and specific in this content sharing, which shouldn’t bore them or frustrate them with the frequency.

Offer value and give more than you take

You should offer them something valuable such as info, news, offers, new insights etc. Otherwise why should they join you? If you are solely focusing on marketing message through your group, soon you will find that the members are quitting on their own.

Initiate conversations

It is a tedious effort to keep a Facebook group active. You need to always think of some great ideas to initiate conversations and prompt the members to get actively engaged to keep the conversations flowing.

While administering social media marketing through Facebook, you need to be utmost natural in delivering your messages and contents to the target audience. Increasing the frequency of people visiting your FB page can also help you in effectively enhancing your organic SEO performance. Next we will discuss how your social media efforts help in search engine optimization.

Impact of social media marketing on SEO

Even if there is no direct link, social media marketing efforts have a significant positive impact on the search engine results, too. There is a fair chance that social links may or may not boost the search engine ranking of businesses. Many online marketers now take into account that the links to a website through social media do have a positive impact on the ranking.

• Quality content and links do pay

As of late, links are created around original and quality content, which in turn gets shared across social media to gain popularity. So, links to your genuine content on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ etc. can help search engines like Google and Bing to understand which websites are credible and thus to be ranked on top.

• Backlinks

With the latest Google search engine algorithms, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages are also treated the same way as the other indexed pages. So everything that happens on these pages gets crawled by the spiders. So, there is every possibility that the links published on authorized social media can act as credible back-links and can contribute towards better ranking of the page.

• Social media profiles

There are chances that the social shares may or may not support the ranking of a web page in search engines, but it is proven that social profiles do have an influence on the search results. The top social media profiles seem to come on top in the search engine results in the listings for brand names.

There is no doubt that social profile is also important for the people who are looking for your business online. Going through your profile is counted as a more engaging and personal approach now. So it always pays you on maintaining an up-to-date profile with engaging content.

Conclusion

Nowadays, people are also largely dependent on social media channels to gather information rather than just going through Google and Bing. As many of them are always active on Facebook and Twitter, it works well for a business to be presented to masses through these social media channels to be easily accessible.

Those brands which also lend themselves with attractive visual images on Pinterest and Instagram with appropriate hashtags are also found to benefit highly in social acceptance. In conclusion, along with building an online brand through your official website, it is also essential to build a brand on social media platform to be successful in the increasing online competition.