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How to Optimize Your Facebook Contentfor Better Referral TrafficBy Lucy Hitz – April 13, 2015

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Facebook is driving users towebsites at ever-increasing rates.The network’s impact on web traffichas pushed the volume of socialmedia traffic higher than organic

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traffic in many cases.

Facebook sends more traffic to brand websites than any other social network, by far. Arecent Shareaholic report showed that Facebook now drives nearly 25% of social mediareferral traffic.

If you’re a social marketer, right now you might be asking yourself:

How can I drive more referral traffic from Facebook?

Below are some tips for optimizing your content and your use of Facebook Insights so youcan experience better referral traffic from the friendliest network.

Make Sure You’ve Given Facebook Crawler AccessThe Facebook Crawler (no, this has nothing to do with Spiderman) fetches content fromyour site and generates a preview for people on Facebook.

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An example of how the Facebook Crawler auto-populates a preview image for a link when a Facebook users shares

your link.

When a Facebook user shares a URL, it activates the Facebook Crawler. If your content ispublicly available, the Crawler has no problem accessing it, but if your content requires a loginor has restricted access, you need to enable access for the Facebook Crawler to generatepreviews.

This is important because folks are much more likely to click on your content when there is a

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preview image attached. According to our latest Facebook study, visual content is theprimary driver of engagement on Facebook.

After photos, our study found that videos are the second most-engaging content type,averaging more than 2,500 engagements per post.

Brands have recognized the power of visual content: together, photos and videos account formore than 80% of brand posts.

Optimize for Facebook’s Internal SEOThe Facebook Crawler scrapes the HTML of URL’s that are shared on the network. To staycompetitive, optimize what the Facebook Crawler picks up from your pages by using OpenGraph meta tags.

These are the most basic tags you can use.

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Source: Facebook Developers Site

For more improved distribution and engagement, consider adding these HTML tags.

og: type

What it is: The content type of the page.

The impact: This tag determines how your content shows up in News Feed. If you don’tspecify a type, the default is website. You must choose one, even if the page in question

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features many content types.

og: locale

What it is: Where the resource is located geographically. The default is en_US. You canuse og:locale:alternate if you have other available language translations available.

The impact: This tag helps you deliver the most geographically and linguistically relevantcontent to users.

article: author

What it is: A way of linking to the author(s) of the article you’re publishing.

The impact: This tag helps you link content more directly to its producer — likely, a memberof your organization.

The target of the article: author tag can either be a Facebook Profile or a Facebook Page. Asan added bonus, Facebook will likely offer a chance to follow the article’s author(s) when it’sdisplayed in the news feed. Your authors must have follow enabled so that people can followthem.

This is a good time to remind you that your authors, especially if they’re thought leaders inyour space, should have Facebook Pages which invite users to follow them, not just Friendthem. This strengthens bonds with the author and, thus, your brand. It also makes theirposts more likely to show up in followers’ feeds.

article: publisher

What it is: A way of linking to the publisher of the article you’re publishing.

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The impact: This tag helps you link content more directly to your organization. The targetmust be a Facebook Page. As an added bonus, Facebook will likely offer a chance to followyou, the publisher, when the content is displayed in the news feed. This tag is only available to

media publishers.

Make Your Images ShineHere are some quick tips to make sure your images on Facebook are catalysts for sharing,not snoozing.

When Your Graphic Designer’s MIA

We work in social media. We didn’t get design degrees and we don’t have enough time tolearn how to use Photoshop. Luckily, Canva exists (I swear they didn’t pay me to say that).Recite This is also a great resource for easily sharable organizational and/or inspirationalquotes on sleek backdrops.

There are other options out there, but the point is, you don’t necessarily need to be aPhotoshop wiz or have an eye for design to create effective visuals for Facebook.

Choose the Right Colors

By applying certain colors in the buying / reading / sharing process, you can see better resultson Facebook.

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Colors, emotions, and the brands who choose them.

For example, blue signals trust, red encourages action, and yellow activates excitement. Thispsychology of color isn’t a hard science, but it’s something to keep in mind before youchoose neon pink as the background for your social image. You can learn more about colorpsychology on social here.

Go Logo Crazy

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Our personal experience at Simply Measured has taught us that the presence of arecognizable logo helps posts generate more shares.

An example of using an external big brand to draw content shares.

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If you have the opportunity, include a logo (not necessarily yours) to feature in your imageand watch shares skyrocket.

Text Tips

Make sure the sense that your image conveys, your Facebook copy, and the content on thewebpage are synergistic.

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An example of image, caption, and link text all working together delightfully.

Keeping it consistent is crucial, especially since people choose whether to click through or

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not based on the text on an image. You want to make sure they know what they’re gettinginto by clicking to avoid high bounce rates.

Another text tip to remember: the less text, the better. Don’t bombard your alluring imagewith paragraphs of text. Include just enough text to convey the information you’re hopingcatches people’s eyes.

Size ‘Em Right

Use images that are at least 1200 x 630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices.At the minimum, use images that are 600 x 315 pixels to display link page posts with largerimages.

How Does Your Brand Hack Facebook for OptimizedSharing?We want to know! Tell us all your secrets! Just kidding…but, seriously, do you have tips andtricks you’ve learned along the way that you’d be willing to share? Holler in the comments.

Need a more basic lay of the strategy land on Facebook, from industry-standard definitionsto successful case studies? Be sure to download our recently revamped Facebook ebook byclicking below.

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Lucy HitzI’m the Content Marketing Producer here at Simply Measured, which means I getto research the latest and greatest in social media, and tell you all about it. I loveyoga, prosciutto, peaty scotch, poetry, and Taylor Swift. If I were a social mediachannel, I’d want to be Instagram, but I think I’m Twitter.

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2 Comments Simply Measured 1

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• Reply •

Affiliate Management • 4 days ago

nice tips...how should those meta-tags looks for Facebook? 1△ ▽

• Reply •

Brian Mack • 11 hours ago

an example of how to use/write those tags would be nice. △ ▽

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