Written by ContentPowered.com
It’s undeniable at this point that Facebook is a huge source of revenue, audience and engagement for any brand. It’s virtually indispensible to the modern business. What’s hard to pinpoint is exactly how Facebook works for you. In particular, many wonder; does your fan count have a direct effect on Google search rankings?
The Old Answer
There was a time, many moons ago, when the great and powerful Google did in fact monitor social media signals, including follower count, and use them to influence the ranking of individual businesses. That time is long since over, but rumors still persist. Why? Many pages with high rankings have a lot of fans, while pages with low rankings tend to have fewer fans. This is a problem of correlation, however, not of causation. Pages with more fans tend to be doing something right to increase their ranking as well as increase their number of fans.
The Current Answer
Today, Google does not care about the number of fans you have. Google at one point relied on social signals from Twitter, and was burned when Twitter closed off their feed and left Google without that source of information. Since then, Google has learned to keep their data streams limited to publicly available information and information they control.
The Risks of Robot Fans
There’s another reason Google doesn’t care about your number of followers, specifically. Consider the difference between two businesses. Business A and Business B are both identical. They both reside in the same industry, they have identical websites, they’re based in the same building; everything about them is the same. They both have identical Facebook pages, and they both have exactly 100 followers. The difference is that Business A built their followers manually, while Business B went to Fiverr and purchased 100 followers.
Both businesses post a status update. Business A receives several comments and a share. Business B gets nothing.
The reason for this is the quality of those individual fans. Fans bought through a service such as Fiverr are generally either created by robots or but cheap labor in a third world nation. Once they do their duty and follow your page, that’s it. They don’t care about your business. They don’t follow your posts and comment on them or share them with your friends; at least, not unless they’re paid to do so. Even in the most perfect world, none of them are ever going to convert into paying customers.
The Benefits of Organic Followers
Contrast this with organic followers. When you build an audience organically, what you’re doing is accumulating a list of people who are genuinely interested in your business, your products and your services. These interested, organic users are very beneficial in a number of ways.
First of all, they’re interested and engaged with your brand. That means they read your status updates and they understand what you’re trying to say. Whether or not they engage with individual updates depends on how well you appeal to them, of course, but ideally you’ll be very appealing.
Engaged fans are more likely to comment on your posts, like them, and share them with others. All three of these actions make your posts show up in the news feeds of that follower’s friends. Each person a second degree removed who sees your posts is an impression you didn’t have before. Obviously, no robot fan is going to do that for you.
Secondly, engaged fans are more likely to click through to your blog and read your posts. This gives you an opportunity to become a valuable resource to them, which builds trust and further engagement. Users who trust your brand will share it and promote it with their friends, when the opportunity arises.
Additionally, while those fans are on your site, they’re exposed to your other advertising channels. It might be a sidebar ad that directs them to an ebook you wrote. It might be a related post that leads to something more directly advertorial. It may be a pop-up that encourages them to register for your mailing list. All of these are impressions you can never get from robot followers.
Third, and most importantly, the engaged fan will become a conversion. Sooner or later, as you build brand engagement to a critical mass, followers will trust you enough to purchase your product or try your service. No fan you paid for will give you money in return.
A Matter of Viral Reach
In a perfect world, every follower of your page would see your updates. In reality, less than one in ten ever does, not naturally. Facebook allows you to pay to further promote your posts, which is viable for some posts but not as a constant strategy. Instead, you need to work to build viral exposure.
Viral exposure is any second-degree view you didn’t pay for. When a follower comments on your post, and one of their friends sees your post because of their comment, that’s a viral impression. Every follower is a single organic impression for you, but they represent a potential hundreds or thousands of viral impressions through their friends. Of course, it continues beyond their friends as well; if a friend of a follower also shares your post, it’s a whole new degree of exposure. Viral reach can greatly outshine organic and paid reach combined, in the right circumstances.
Tied Into SEO
How does all of this relate to SEO and your specific search ranking? Think about the metrics Google measures to determine your ranking. Many of them, yes, are independent of your followers. Your followers don’t affect your keywords, your site speed and your server location.
Followers do affect other metrics, though. A higher number of followers means a larger group of people who might post about your brand on their own blogs or websites. Those organic backlinks are a powerful SEO metric. That alone is worth broadening your Facebook audience. Reposts on other social networks, comments on your blog, additional exposure and ongoing dialogue; it all affects your search ranking, and it all comes from having a large, engaged audience.
Fred W.
says:Thanks for clarifying. I think one day Facebook and social will have a much bigger effect on rankings