For any educational institute, reputation is one of the most valuable assets. In the age of social media, your Facebook page plays a huge role in how you are perceived by students and the media.

In addition to that a well-designed and active Facebook page can become an excellent publicity and engagement tool. After all, it’s the one platform where a majority of your existing, ex, and prospective students are likely to hang out.

Having an impressive presence can therefore help you network with the alumni, attract new students, engage with and support existing ones.

However, in order to create the right impact, your Facebook page needs to be visible. This is where SEO for your page comes in!

Why Is Facebook Page SEO Important?

Search engine optimization of your Facebook page essentially makes your Institute’s page available to Facebook’s entire user base as well as that of general search engines, thus helping you attract users you otherwise may not have had access to.

So, how do you optimize your Facebook page? Here are the top 5 techniques that can help you get maximum visibility:

1. Pick a relevant title and URL for your Facebook page

Ideally, your Facebook page should feature your Institute’s name as the title. Don’t go overboard with using keywords here though, as Facebook may penalize you for using generic names or too many keywords in your title.

Make your page easily identifiable and searchable by mentioning your brand name as your page’s title. Do the same with your Facebook URL. You can customize the URL to also feature your title name, but be careful as once set, your Facebook URL can’t be changed

2. Identify The Right Set Of Keywords

Facebook provides ample opportunity to feature relevant keywords and phrases for better SEO. Make sure you spend enough time to identify the right set of keywords and feature them in the page’s metadata, pictures and posts.

You may zero in on the keywords for your Facebook page by analyzing your analytics data, identifying the long tail keywords that drive maximum traffic, and searching for the most profitable options through the Google Keyword tool.

You must also ensure that the keywords you pick are extremely relevant and use them in a manner that they gel seamlessly with your content.

For example, let’s say one of your keywords is, ‘Film School’, post a) would appear more natural as compared to post b):

a)      What’s the one thing you hope to master at a Film School?
b)     What’s the one Film School thing you hope to master when you join a Film School?

3. Spend some time on the metadata

While technically it’s not the metadata, you can still input key information about your business in the “About” and “Info” sections of your Facebook page.

The text you fill in these sections must make the best use of featuring your keywords and phrases to make it easily searchable. Again don’t go overboard, just make sure your target keywords appear at least once each in the ‘About’ and ‘Information’ section, and that they look natural.

It is also important for you to add links to your website so that Facebook recognizes it as the official page for your Institute.

4. Build links to the Facebook page

Ensure that you feature links to your Facebook page on your website and other social accounts to drive more traffic to it. It’s also a good idea to add your Facebook page’s URL to all e-mails and communication you send across, especially if you use Gmail. With Google’s Gmail field trial already in the beta testing phase, doing this has become all the more important.

Once the feature gets implemented, it will allow users to see personalized results from their Gmail mailbox and Google drive when they run a general Google search.

From an SEO perspective, it means that including your Facebook page’s URL in your Gmail communication will help you gain more visibility in personalized search results (when the feature is officially launched).

5. Feature images and videos on the Facebook page

It’s not just important to have a Facebook page – you must also update it regularly with an interesting mix of content including text, photos, and videos to keep your students/fans engaged.

Facebook’s search algorithm (Edgerank) takes users’ browsing preferences into account when creating personalized news feeds. So, if certain users interact more with Video and images links, the same are likely to be featured more prominently than textual posts in their news feeds.

Therefore, it’s important to ensure that you have all three elements—text, images, and videos on your Facebook page.

You can also use SEO techniques on the metadata about the pictures and videos you share by including keywords in their descriptions.

These tips will hopefully help you attract more social visibility for your institute. See you at the top!

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