Social Media nowadays is not just limited to connecting with friends or acquaintances, sharing pictures or life updates. It has become a platform for business marketing as well, both in the global as well as the local field.

Facebook, as we all know, is the king of social networks. It is a good place to reach out to clients and build your brand online. The said social network provides much different functionality in which SEO analyst; web developers and marketers can use to get their business noticed online.

In this article we will be focusing on how you can optimize your local business' online presence with the use of Facebook.

10 Tips To Optimize Your Local Business Using Facebook

• A Good Page Name -It is best to have the name of your business as your page name in Facebook. This will help maintain a consistent identity of your brand and search engines can associate your Facebook page with your business. If you have establishments located in different areas, you can create a page with your business name plus the location, such as: Joe's Diner - Los Angeles.

• Inject Keywords in About Section - There is no need to be an expert web developer in order to get this done. Writing something for the "About" page is quite manageable. Insert keywords, essential business details as well as local address and phone number in the information section of your Facebook page, as this can help in the optimization for search engines. However, always remember to not overstuff it with keywords and keep in mind the proper keyword density, as this will gain high ranking in SERPs.

• Customize Facebook URL - As soon as you get certain numbers of Likes in Facebook, you will be able to make a custom URL for your page. It is best to still use your keywords, company or business name to add into the URL - as this will help in sharing your social profile easily and put a signal to search engines to associate the page with your product brand and services.

• Become a Fan - Use your local business page to become a fan of related local pages in Facebook, however, keep away from competitors. Liking a related local business page will enable you to interact and post comments on their updates, which gives you more exposure to the target audience.

• Target Locations with Status Updates - This is a good function to promote your brand products or services in a certain location. This will allow your status updates only to appear to people in specific locations. You can set this by clicking the dropdown arrow under your status box and change "Public" to Location/Language where you can specify a particular country, city or state.

• Offsite Page Links - Link to your Facebook page from your official blog or business website. This increases the value of your Facebook page in search engines and connects your brand with its social network outlets in the web. You can also consider spending some time commenting or posting to blogs or forums including a link to your page to maximize the backlinks.

• Content With Snippets - Turn your Facebook page into a hub of information where people get relevant answers to their needs in relation to the products or services that your business offers. You can post snippets of articles or lines with keywords from your official local business website then the link towards the page. This will serve as another inbound link strategy that helps in increasing your online presence.

• Add Images - Since Facebook implemented its Timeline version, posted pictures are the first things to capture the attention of many. As such, businesses took this advantage to promote their brands and services. Hence, it is recommended to put a cover photo that depicts the story of your local brand and tells the customers what it is all about. You can also add some graphics and images into your status updates as this will result in more "Likes".

• Regular Content Update - Unique, relevant and interesting content has always been an important factor in SEO. It can add value to your Facebook page. A page update highlights fun and informative contents that drive likes to your page. You can also reward you page fans special discounts on your products or host contests in your local page. This will give followers the idea that you have an active page and increase the value of your SEO efforts.

• Facebook Ads - This is an affordable way in promoting your brand to your target customers in a specific country, city, state, region, and etc. Facebook gives you the capability of serving ads only in a targeted geographical area, you will also know how many people are likely to see your ads, use images, and show up in a user's Facebook News feeds once they click "Like".

These are just some of the countless tips out there for optimizing Facebook pages for your local business. And as with all global or local SEO strategies, never expect increase in conversion to happen immediately, as everything takes time to see the change in results.

However, giving constant reliable and quality content in your page is not rocket science; all you need to keep in mind is what your clients and future customers want and need from a local business, and make sure that you cater to them effectively.

Hi! I'm Jollie Garado and I'm interested in writing about technology and SEO - outsourcing, link building or outsource web development to improve your small business.

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Many people want to know if it is better to focus on local or national social networking for business. The truth about this is that it depends on what the goals of the company. However, there are downsides and upsides to focusing on both approaches. Each can be effective, but the timing of each method really depends on what state the business is in at the moment that the decision is made that they should join the social networks.

In general, it is better for a company to focus on the local area first. This is because the company can catch the low hanging fruit in their business. There is far less competition in the local area than the whole world. This allows a business to train in a small pond before they invest a lot of time and money in competing with the big boys in a market place. Too many businesses try to be larger than their skill level allows them. This causes them to lose a lot of money in advertising. This is no different than testing a message in direct mail. A message can be sent to a very small portion of the list. This allows a business to get an idea of the effectiveness of the ad before they jump into the deep end with both feet. This is the smartest strategy that a business can take before they spend a lot of money in a market that may not be profitable.

One of the problems with marketing to a smaller town is that the town may not have the statistical relevance necessary to make an educated guess. This lack of relevance makes it very hard to test a message. There is a major search engine that says that 1000 actions are needed before statistical relevance is achieved. However, this is not possible in some markets because a person may only get 20 visitors a day. These visitors may not click anything, which means that it could take years to finally get to that 1000 action threshold. This is a massive problem that should be considered before a business makes the choice to be local first.

The solution may not be to be national, however. Even though the pool is larger, it takes skill to manage the amount of clicks that can come into a server. The competition is also much stiffer and a company may never generate much traffic unless the person managing the campaign is a master of driving social media traffic. A business can also experience explosive growth where the business cannot keep up the demand placed on them. This is a massive problem that should be avoided.

The real answer to this question depends on where the business is before it enters the social media platforms. There are pros and cons to targeting the local area and the national area. However, it is always smart to start small and work up from there. This allows a business to learn the pitfalls in their marketing message and allows them the business owner to make changes as needed.

Scott Buendia consults for Bizbuilt.com. All the views and tactics in this article are tactics and ideas of the author; they do not necessarily represent the ideals, beliefs, or trademarks of Bizbuilt.com. Visit his card on Bizbuilt here, https://www.bizbuilt.com/socialmediaprivacy.

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