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Unfortunately there is no real easy way to do this at present because as far as im aware (may be wrong) facebook keeps its search volume data to itself.  Although this may change in the near future as they have recently rolled out their own PPC platform for sponsored results. Instead I would keep an eye on other metrics such as brand mentions and likes and the rate at which these are gained during your social medial campaigns.

One thing I've previously wondered before is why they are not better capitalising on the place data that they have. For any given named location they have a growing collection of businesses and organisations with quite deep and unique content (their posts).  This gives them the potential to have massive numbers of "hair dressers in southampton" type pages that have far more mature content than most of the sites that sit on those SERPs. This traffic would also seem to be closely aligned with their advertising packages (plumbers in places close to southampton might want to pay to have their ads shown on that page), which makes them valuable pages in terms of direct ad revenue and also for convertising more businesses to have places pages and to become potential advertisers themselves. That would definitely be one of the first things I tackled if I were doing SEO for FB. If nothing else it would give me peace of mind and put an end to something that has been troubling me for years!

I'd also contact your host and let them know that you may be getting a spike in traffic on a particular day, and to please not shut the site down. Depending on the site architecture, look at putting in some type of caching and otherwise prepare for an increased load. Make sure the image file sizes on your home page are optimized, etc.

I think the answer is different for each business. For SEOmoz, Twitter is our primary social channel. That's where people come to ask us questions, where we promote our posts, announce site outages, etc. Our customers use Facebook to communicate with us about 1/10 as much as they do Twitter regarding our site. I don't have the traffic stats in front of me, but I know for communicating with our customers, Twitter beats Facebook hands down. And I know for other companies it is just the opposite. They'll have all kinds of conversations with their customers on Facebook, and nobody talks to their Twitter account. Try it out, see what works for you.

Hi Larry, Ah, the age old question of subdomain or subdirectory. You are right, there really isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. From what I've seen, I think the subdirectory is usually a better answer for SEO but I don't think the subdomain is a horrible answer. A subdomain is really a different site with only limited connections. It might have a different branding or a different focus than the main site. If your point is to create a really separate website, then using a subdomain makes sense. However, if it really is a separate site altogether, I'd opt for a separate domain so you can make that intention of treating these as different sites crystal clear. If the sub-site is a part of the same site (same company, same brand, it connects to content on the rest of the site), then I would opt for the subdirectory. This makes it easier to keep all the content connected within the site and any links or social activity you get to pages in that subdirectory is more likely to help other parts of the site. So, for that reason I would opt for a subdirectory instead of a subdomain. I hope that helps. Thanks, Matthew

I do like how the social media pops out the side but you have to question are users going skip over it. Would it be more effective if they didn't have to hover over the icon to see what's going on on your news feed and which of their friends already like your page - by just simply glancing to the sidebar. But then again building fans to your fan page isn't your end goal. Building fans is merely a technique used to accomplish your end goal of making sales or conversions. So I can see how compromising page real estate can be a factor. However you can consider writing a custom message that adds value to your facebook fanpage. A compelling message above or near the facebook plugin convincing a user to become a fan may be appropriate. Or if you have a contest running then informing your web visitors would work well. I think the custom social media bars you have under each blog post is set up nicely to receive webpage likes. Establishing a referral program  can help get your webpage liked/shared. Your h4s and alt tags could be more keyword rich but the main content looks natural and include relevant keywords. However, I would consider placing a prominent call-to-action above the fold somewhere. These are just suggestions as there are multiple ways you could do this. Hope this helps.

Hi Keri, Yes FollowerWonk is great but it doesn't seem to allow for that... Justin

Agree with you on protecting brand if the changes stick. We hadn't noticed this until about 7-10 days ago and it seems like it's really taken hold within the past couple of days.  The effects on the non-local search results seem pretty significant. We especially noticed in on LinkedIn pages becoming highly ranked and much more information on Facebook likes, "talking abouts" and "were here's" --- also number of YouTube results being pulled back seems much higher than normal. The shear number of social pages being ranked on non-local search results was very interesting.  Appending local words to the search queries really seemed to strip out the social page rankings.

I have 17,000 subscribers.   That brings lots of traffic into my website every day.  Imagine the opportunity loss if they were not getting daily invitations to my site.

Hey There What you want is "contributor to" -> http://screencast.com/t/HhLjilNE -Dan

Morgan, A phase in this case is a development stage. previous phases were newspapers, radio, television, Netscape. A future phase for all I know might be 3D imaging, which if another provider is quick on the uptake, could make Google's search engine obsolete over time.

Thanks for adding this information! I had wondered why people I hardly knew were sharing something "directly" with me.

The quick answer is that we could either crawl all of Twitter...or we could crawl some of Twitter, and crawl some of the rest of the web. We just don't have the resources to crawl all of Twitter right now, so not everything there gets picked up in OSE.

Just giving an opinion that might not be representative of websites in general.... In my industry people don't know anything about google+. So you can leverage your ass off but if nobody is on the other end of the lever then you just wasted a bunch of time.

It depends on what your branding strategy is, are you trying to develop more of a brand and reputation as Joe Smith, owner of Acme Widgets, or do you want Acme Widgets to be a well known resource for all things widget related? I personally think doing both is a great idea - it takes more time but you get the benefits of both. You will have a little bit of a harder time as a business rather than an individual though, people want to see  human faces in their stream, not logos - you should still use a logo or mascot that represents the business though, otherwise this will be confusing. People are generally leary about following businesses and dont want to be marketed to.  Due to this uphill battle you will have to really focus on a great content strategy to connect with users, provide useful information and go out of your way to find and answer questions. It also doesn't hurt to humanize your brand a bit.  Use words like "We" a lot and not "our company" or "Acme Widgets" - make jokes and be transparent.  You can also add a picture of the individual behind "@AcmeWidgets" to the twitter background to help give it that human element. Also regardless of which account you are on, concentrate on connecting to users and sharing great content - don't spend the majority of your time talking about yourself, your company or your widgets.  People will get turned off by the over-promotion.

Thanks Mat case_closed.jpg

NIce one Brandon, thanks

Thanks Abe - however i am wondering how SEO moz determines these metrics - ie; how does a brand get 30 shares on facebook? How are these recorded? We have clients that we are trying to explain the Open Site explorer results in social section and cannot explain why they have got these 30 shares for example and where they came from. Does that make sense? Cheers, Sue

I really like David's advice. Break down hesitancy by sharing yourself.  Make yourself approachable, available, understandable, and caring with soft wisdom.  Make a video that shows the office where you meet with people and the privacy and caring that you offer. If you show them the path they will enter it with less hesitation and if you show what they will receive they will desire it. YouTube is the second most used search engine on this planet.  It is not a flat medium like text.  It enables you to include sight and sound to build familiarity.