Although the growth rate of Facebook has slowed down a bit without doubt it is the most widely used social network in the world and a good source of traffic to your blog or business website. But not every business gets thousands of visitors from Facebook, and in this article I will show you how to maximize the potential of your Facebook page and make it a great referral traffic source.
Getting People to Like Your Page
This is the first step in building your Facebook traffic machine. Unless you’re a popular brand you will struggle to get people to like your page. You need to give an incentive for users to like your page. It could be a discount, a free download or some amazing gift. If you have the budget you can create a Facebook application where users has to like the page to get access to your prices. Contests are another great way to drive traffic to your Facebook page and increase likes and interaction.
If you’re giving an incentive to increase your Facebook likes make sure the award is related to your business. For example giving away an iPhone will surely increase your likes, but you will attract users who have no interest at all about your business. For example when promoting our Visio alternative page we gave away a 10% discount for liking our Facebook page. We didn’t get hundreds of likes, but what we got was interested users who took the time to engage with our users.
Understanding EdgeRank
Edge Rank Factors
What is EdgeRank? It’s the algorithm that decided what posts appears in users timeline. Understanding this algorithm is the key to your Facebook success. Anything you do in Facebook is an edge. Liking a page, commenting on a post and uploading a picture are some example of edges. EdgeRank determines which edges are relevant to users and display them on their feed.
Three factors contribute to the EdgeRank. Affinity, Recency and the edge weight. Lets explore these factors and how you can utilize them to get more traffic.
Each edge is given a certain weight call edge weight. Facebook haven’t mentioned any specific weights given to each edges but in general image and video uploads have a larger weight. This is the reason you tend to see pictures more often in your timeline. A business or a blog can make use of this fact by sharing more images in their updates.
Recency is the freshness of the update. The latest updates tend to show up in timelines more often. Business can take advantage of this by providing a steady stream of update overtime. If you’re a global brand be aware of time difference, which hours gets the most traffic etc. to make the maximum use of the freshness factor.
The final factor is the affinity and the factor that most people have trouble understanding. In very simple terms affinity determines the relationship a user has with a page or a person. In case of a business its the relationship the user has with the business page. For example if someone likes you page they are shown your updates from time to time. If that person likes those updates as well then he or she is frequently shown updates from that page.
If the brands can get more people to like their updates their affinity with users grow so they have a much higher chance of getting traffic to their website. It is alright to share you product updates or business news with users but you wont get many likes or shares. To increase interaction you need to share interesting things. Funny images, famous quotes relevant to you niche are some good examples. People tend to share them more often so you will definitely increase your affinity then.
Recent changes to Google search results makes it more important than ever to focus on increasing referral traffic sources like Facebook. Follow the steps above and you can turn Facebook into a good source of traffic and business leads.
