Face Book..your thoughts on promoting on main web site

[johnshearer]

Moz Community,

I would like Facebook promotion opinions. I have a local business (Seattle painting contractor) and have built a fan page  which engages our clients, local & national suppliers, friends and other contractors.

Our original intent was to use the fan page to promote our main website; we never added a prominent "like us" button on our main page, we did not want to convert for facebook when our best content was on our site.

I have been pleasantly surprised this past year how many fans we have accumulated by promotion and by accident. The main benefit has been rewarding engagement from other industry marketers such as Benjamin Moore paint company, and introductions to local design professionals..and these conversations once started continue by direct communication (email..phone).

I have just added a facebook link on my blog..see attached picture Join our 2500+ fans. Primarily because the visitors to the blog tend to be the sort that engage on Facebook vs  the type that want a painting contractor (Google analytics traffic data and click through behavior). I now have more traffic to the blog than the front end site.

What do you think of the button? What else should be promoting?

Come Learn more, see what we are about, enage, share, & learn

facebook_button.png

[PhilNottingham]

If you're getting good engagement with Facebook, you're doing something right and I would be inclined to jump in and leverage your success here to holistically improve your performance across Search & Social. The focus of any SEO campaign should ultimately not be better rankings in Google, but better conversions and more traffic. If FB is helping you to achieve this - awesome.  To that end, the FB like button is a good idea for you as it helps to build your brand trust for any site visitors and encourages further engagement in your active social community.

That said.... the design of your button sucks. Sorry, I know that's harsh, but you'll be better off using the official FB like button which looks much more professional. i would use this one: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/ The same goes for your G+ button - use the one they've created, rather than your own version.

Another mega quick-win for you would be to implement the FB comments plugin:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

This will quickly fix your issue of having no comments on your blog posts, plus encourage more engagement on FB and help to engagement the community there.

[johnshearer]

Phil..great feedback about buttons and comment form. Will make changes thanks.