What's the new Facebook 'Promote' Feature all about?

If you are a Page admin then you may have noticed that there are new icons on you business Facebook Page when you are writing a post that weren’t there before..? Does the word promote ring a bell as shown in Figure 1?

Figure 1

So what does this new 'promote' feature do?

Well, promoted posts are a simple way to reach more of the people who like your Page and their friends. Visit your Page to try promoting a post. Promoted posts are available to Pages with 400 to 100,000 likes.

When you promote a post, it will be shown in the news feeds of more of the people who like your Page than you would reach normally. Friends of the people who have interacted with your post will also be more likely to see the story in their news feeds for up to 3 days from when the post was first created.

What to know how it's done? Well here you go!

1. Go to the sharing tool to create a post and enter your post details.

2. Click on the Promote drop-down button and set your desired budget. Note: the budget you set is a lifetime budget and not a daily budget as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

3. Click save and away you go, it's that simple!

So you may be thinking, if I don’t promote my post, will the people who like my Page still see it?

Nothing has changed about how your posts are shared with the people who like your Page.

A lot of activity happens on Facebook and most people only see some of it in their news feeds. They may miss things when they’re not on Facebook, or they may have a lot of friends and Pages, which results in too much activity to show all of it in their news feed. 

If you don’t promote your post, many of the people connected to your Page will still see it. However, by promoting a post, you’re increasing its potential reach so an even larger percentage of your Page audience and the friends of those interacting with your post will see it.

All of the above information has been taken from the Facebook Help Page so if you get stuck please click here for more information or give Nutcracker a call on 01384 455 141 today.

Top 10 tips on how to get in Google’s good books!

Google Panda's updates are designed to penalise sites with weak content and favour those with quality content. So here is what you need to do to stay ahead of the game:

1. Produce high quality unique content
2. Get rid of low quality pages
3. Avoid duplicate content and scrapped pages
4. Become an authority
5. Promote content over social media
6. Improve bounce rate
7. Improve user experience
8. Avoid keyword flooding – use language that sounds natural
9. Vary anchor text- use 10-15 different key words and alternate between them
10. Focus on high quality back links, especially if you only have low quality ones.

However be patient when making these changes…results don’t happen overnight.

(Source: Search Engine Journal)

So you may wonder why it is so important to rank favourable amongst Google searches. Well that’s because worldwide we conduct 88 million searches per month on Google. Along with Google analytics been used on 57% of the top 10,000 websites.

Don’t forget about the Penguin update that happened on 24th April 2012, which evaluates your websites incoming links to see if your site involves link schemes intending to improve rankings.