SEO for Facebook posts

SEO for Facebook posts. Below are the best Practices for optimizing your Facebook posts.

Facebook’s recently launched  tool “The Audience Optimization tool” provides a lot more options for increasing the relevance of your posts on Facebook pages.

This tool comes with three features: Preferred Audience, Audience Restrictions, and  Audience Insights.

After Facebook’s Canvas, which is for paid advertisements catered towards mobile traffic, this is great news for non-paid, organic posts on Facebook pages.

What does preferred Audience do?

This is to do with targeting your posts for the audience your post is most relevant for. The earlier feature in Facebook “Interest Targeting” did not allow for the posts to be viewed through news feeds, by people who did not belong to the Interest groups set by you, thereby limiting the reach of the post. With preferred audience optimization, you can select the interest groups that may be the most relevant for your post, without preventing others from viewing it (unless otherwise specified through age, gender, geography, and language restrictions discussed after this). This ensures that your post reaches the prioritized interest groups without limiting its reach.

What does Audience Restrictions do?

For instance, If your post is about retirement planning, after selecting the “Interest groups” for your post, Facebook’s Audience Restrictions feature will enable you to customize your post further. If your target audience is in the age group of 25+, you can customize your post by selecting the target age group,  if it is targeted to working women only, you may want to customize it further by selecting the gender option as well. If your retirement planning post is targeted to specific regions only, you may do so by selecting the location option. You can even block the regions for which your plan is not valid.

Now that you have optimized your post by selecting options that are most relevant, it is time to check out the performance of the post. And that is where Audience Insights comes in.

What does Audience Insights do?

With Audience insight, you can learn about the engagement levels of the audience in terms of each of the interest tags that were selected when you created the post. Audience insights enables you to track the engagement level from each of these interest groups. This data will enable you to act and optimize your posts further and continue to analyze performance overtime.

This tool may or may not bring in additional traffic but will certainly have a larger impact in terms of the interest levels it generates since relevance is the key driver here. Currently this audience optimization tool is available for English language pages only.

Facebook has a very detailed page about best practices for optimizing posts for higher performance. There is a section on interest tagging that would be extremely helpful in determining the interest groups for your posts. You may want to visit the Facebook page on Tips for Tagging Articles in Audience Optimization.

It is going to be quite exciting to watch and experience the outcome of this optimization tool from Facebook. This is indeed a step forward in ensuring that organics posts get armed with all the relevant tools to attract relevant traffic.