Ski Resorts and the New SEO: Facebook Optimization

I’ve covered SEO. I’ve covered social media. Now I’m going to cover both. Optimizing your social media. You heard right, it may not be enough to simply have a Facebook account and post clever statuses, pow shots, and weekly videos. I was exchanging a few emails with Liftopia‘s Evan Reece recently when he brought up the topic of “news feed optimization”. To be honest, I had never even heard the term. The concept, however, is easy enough to understand.

Go to your Facebook account and make sure you are on your news feed by clicking the Facebook logo. Notice what shows up there? Your feed items are not in order of date, there are a lot of friends’ posts that aren’t included, and it may change when you refresh it even though no new posts have been made.

Why does this happen? Because Facebook, like Google, uses an algorythm to try to guess what posts you would be most interested in. It does this by weighing three factors:

• First, affinity, or how often you interact with that person or page. The more you comment, like, and view their stuff, the more Facebook will see you two as close friends whose stuff you’ll likely want to see more of.
• Second, weight. This simply means how popular the post already is based on comments, likes, and views (for photos and videos). The more comments and likes others make, the more weight it carries and the more likely Facebook will be to guess you’ll like it.
• Third, age. The older the post, the less relevant it will be to you in Facebook’s eyes. This is known as “decay“. It may be obvious, but new posts have a higher chance of being toward the top of your newsfeed.

What does this mean to you? This all sounds great and fancy, but what does it mean when it comes down to a resorts Facebook posting strategy. The biggest tip right now is to post things that encourage comments. Questions are a common recommendation. Yes or no questions are even better because they yield even higher interaction. Most marketers are of the opinion that comments carry much more weight that “likes” and will have greater impact upon feed placement.

This is a new topic, so rather than ramble on about what I’ve learned and tested so far, here are a few posts I read that helped get the wheels turning:

• News Feed Optimization and Effective Facebook Posting
• 6 Clever Tricks to Double the Effectiveness of Your Fan Page Status Updates
• How to Optimize Your Facebook News Feed Presence
• News Feed Optimization: Get the Most from Your Facebook Content