Member Avatar for MktgRob

For those using social media or planning on using social media as part of their marketing plan (and ultimately their SEO and SEM efforts), Facebook is the Claude Raines of social media. Facebook is invisible to the search engines and there does not seem to be an abundance of work arounds available on the net. Two options are News Feed Optimization (NFO) and News Feed Marketing (NFM) within Facebook. And while these are nice tricks the reality is that a small percentage of feeds get listed.

Has anyone tried NFO and NFM within Facebook and are willing to share the results? I wonder if Microsoft, in their attempts to move ahead of Google as the pre-eminent search engine, will try to get Bing to recognize and list Facebook content.

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Dani AI

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Good thread — was right to flag the 2009 problem: large parts of Facebook lived behind login walls and site rules that made crawler access unreliable, so in‑feed content rarely surfaced in Google the way a public blog post would. That design pushed many marketers to treat Facebook as an in‑platform traffic channel rather than an SEO source. (discovermybusiness.co)

That reality has shifted in recent years: Meta now allows search engines to surface some public content (Instagram professional accounts and public Page/group posts can appear off‑platform), but private posts, many Marketplace listings and other gated areas remain excluded and users/pages can opt out of external indexing. In short — Facebook/Instagram can help discovery, but only for content made explicitly public and eligible for indexing. (facebook.com)

Practical, low‑risk tactics to get the best of both worlds:

  • Keep canonical, full content on your own site (SEO value still starts on your domain).
  • Use a public Facebook Page, pick a simple username and add your site + keyworded description in the About box so searchers and bots see the association.
  • Add Open Graph tags on your pages so shares render attractive previews (better CTR). (yoast.com)
  • When you want social content to “count” on your site, embed public posts or use an established feed plugin (oEmbed/Smash Balloon) so the content appears in your crawlable HTML. (wordpress.org)
  • Measure clicks with UTM tags (example: ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fb_page) and push for external links — social buzz helps SEO indirectly by creating links and referral traffic. (searchenginejournal.com)

Reality check and wrap: NFO/NFM are useful for reaching Facebook users (agree with ) but they are in‑platform tactics; don’t expect direct PageRank boosts from likes. Diversify channels (good point, ), keep the site as the canonical home of long‑form content, respect privacy/API rules, and monitor what actually gets indexed via Search Console so you know which posts are showing up in search.

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Member Avatar for muta

I have never use NFO or NFM but I think there are many more media around to do your marketing.

Member Avatar for thefandango

Surely the point of marketing on Facebook is to reach the audience of millions within FB, rather than to use it for SEO purposes?

Member Avatar for MktgRob

Surely the point of marketing on Facebook is to reach the audience of millions within FB, rather than to use it for SEO purposes?

Actually, you can probably accomplish both. You can have a web presence and an FB fanpage that you could/would market within FB. The FB fanpage and the website are linked together with the goal of increasing page rank due to the links but the benefits are probably minimal. But, since the most basic goal of SEO is to increase site traffic, the FB fanpage's fans would seek out your website which is linked within the FB page. The FB page should not be a full restating of your website but rather serve in the same way banner ads did originally, to give a sense or sample of the website content in a way that attracts the FB fan to visit the site to learn more. Would you agree on this rather basic hypothesis?

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